Ira Deorum
by embyr-75
Summary: In which heroes suffer. [Whumptober 2019] [Now with bonus!chapter concluding the Muffled Scream/Humiliation story arc]
1. Shaky Hands

_A/N: A series of 31 oneshots based on the prompts for Whumptober 2019. Read them as they're released on my Tumblr (embyrinitalics), or tune in here as I archive them!_

_Prompt No. 1  
Word count: ~2060  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Memory loss, trauma, panic attacks_

**Shaky Hands**

The first time Zelda noticed, he was drawing back the bowstring.

One eye was pinched shut as he took aim, his posture so practiced and familiar it was soothing to look at. But the bowstring trembled, ever so slightly, where his knuckles held the fletching. The bow wasn't heavier than he was used to, and he certainly wasn't lacking the muscle or technique necessary to fire it two dozen times in quick succession before it wore on him. Still, the string was tremoring.

He loosed the arrow and they had venison for supper.

Sometimes his hands shook on the reins when they were riding. Sometimes she would start awake at night, and watch his hands tremble, as he fed the fire, through bleary eyes. Sometimes they would be steady for days.

She asked him once if something was wrong. He smiled and promised he was fine.

But it kept happening. And then, usually a few days later, he would mention something—small things, things he shouldn't have known, things he definitely _hadn't_ known—and it wasn't long before she started connecting the dots.

They had set up camp beside the wind-swept roads winding through Akkala near sunset, having left Tarrey Town and its colorful residents in the distance some time ago, when she saw it again—the telltale tremor of hands as they skewered a fresh catch on a rudimentary spit. Her fingers closed over his before she could think better of it, and her pulse was instantly in her ears. She hadn't meant to confront him, or comfort him, or whatever this was—it was just a reaction. Still, her grip only tightened, and she hesitantly met his probing eyes.

He tried to retreat gently, and when she didn't let go, he murmured, "My hands are dirty."

They were, covered in scales and grime and who knew what else. She didn't mind. Her whole body had been stained with much worse before. It still was, in her dreams.

"Did you—" She took a soft breath, not exactly sure what she meant to ask. "Have you remembered something?"

His eyes widened imperceptibly, the silence pouring out of him draining light from the world and the feeling from her lips. Then he drew back, more firmly this time, and placed the spit over the fire with unwavering, completely unnecessary attention.

She wet her throat, trying again. "Do you… want to talk about it?"

"No."

And that effectively ground her advance to a halt. He never denied her anything. The finality of his response was absolutely jarring. She whispered, "Oh."

Zelda didn't bring it up again after that.

When his hands shook the next morning as he fastened his saddle leathers, she took the buckles from him, quietly working them into submission without meeting his eyes. When they shook two days later when he was trying to uncap his jar of Goron spice over the cooking pot she took that from him, too. _Before our supper turns volcanic_, she had teased, though neither of them had smiled.

There were three days of perfect steadiness after that—or perhaps he was just talking care to hide it well.

On the fourth day, as they set up camp again—they were deep in the shadow of the Gerudo Canyon, which was blistering during the day and borderline frigid at night—the flints trembled as he moved to start the fire, and when she tried to take them from him he finally snapped.

"_Din_, Zelda, I'm not an invalid," he growled. She yanked her hands back as quickly as if they had been burned, and he sighed, dragging a hand over his face. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to shout."

"You didn't shout."

For a moment neither of them moved, or spoke, and for Zelda's part she didn't breathe—but then the wind rustled the sparse underbrush, urging him to light the fire, and in two expert strikes the tinder had caught. He fed it gently, building a tent shape with the scavenged wood, and soon it was roaring so brightly she had to back away from the heat.

"They're just little things," he whispered, suddenly, but when she turned to meet his eyes they were still fixed on the fire. "Glimpses. Not all bad, either. Sometimes they're of you."

She grimaced. "Am I behaving myself?"

The side of his mouth tugged into a smirk. "Sometimes."

He went silent, and she, afraid to pry and afraid to wait idly, said, "I'll get the cooking pot."

His hands were steady as he helped her prop it over the flames and toss in the ingredients for their stew, and as he ladled a spoonful a broth to his lips and subsequently sprinkled in another pinch of seasoning. When it was finished, he handed her a bowl, and her fingers brushed along his as she accepted it. She opened her mouth once, closed it, and then took the bowl.

She took an eager taste and opened her mouth to tell him it was delicious, and was properly mortified when what came out was, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It seemed trivial," he muttered before she could backpedal, and as she was burning to know the answer, she didn't stop him when he seemed agreeable to telling her more. "I never remember anything substantial. Just images, moments. A feeling. And the side effects were tolerable. Barely noticeable," he added, glancing at her wryly, "or so I thought."

She smiled down at her stew, just happy he wasn't angry. "I can be very observant."

"Yes," he laughed softly. "I know."

He fell into another spell of silence, and, assuming he had shared all he was inclined to share, she brought another spoonful to her mouth to mask a disappointed twist of her lips. He finished off his stew, and then a second helping. He looked like he was contemplating a third when he suddenly put his bowl aside and moved back to be closer to her. His eyes were evasive, darting across her throat as he tried to formulate the words. She held her breath.

"I thought as long as it didn't interfere, as long as I never missed a mark…" he trailed off, eyes glued to where his fingers, splayed on the ground near hers, had begun to drift closer, moving steadily until they brushed each other in silent, simultaneous invitation, and then interweaved, feather-soft.

So much of their relationship had progressed this way: all hesitance and delicacy, never spoken, barely touching, afraid of holding on too tight. Afraid of having something precious ripped out of their grasp again.

He sidled closer, letting his jaw touch her cheek, soft as breath—inviting her to take comfort in him, or perhaps asking for comfort. It was hard to be sure. But she was more than happy to do either.

"I didn't want anyone to know—to see it as a weakness."

"Link," she whispered, swallowing, melting into that invitation, pressing so tentatively into the side of his neck, "we're in the wilds. There's no one else here. Just me."

"_Especially_ you," he hissed, so bold as to take her shoulders in his hands, and buried his face in her hair. "You let yourself be swallowed whole by the Calamity itself and kept him confined for a _century_. You've seen things—felt things—that would have broken the most courageous of men, and even when you wake up screaming because of them, you still—"

He stopped, taking a shuddering breath. And then, gently, penitently, he drew her away so he could look her in the eyes.

"When a memory comes my heart pounds until I want to be sick. I see faces and I don't know who they are. I feel pain but don't remember getting the wounds. Sometimes I remember holding you in my arms—and when I come back to myself I don't know how anymore. How could I tell you how badly it makes me want to run? How could I face you then?"

All at once his hands were gone from her shoulders, his eyes were back on the dirt, and there was a foot of space between them, their near-embrace shattering so quickly she wasn't sure it had existed in the first place. He rocked back, propping his elbow on one knee, and ran a hand tautly through his hair.

He whispered, bitterly, "How do I face you now?"

His face was turned down, splashed by undulating shadow and hidden from view. She choked out his name. He didn't move. Hot tears spilled out of her eyes, and she moved, bringing herself close enough that it startled him. His eyes snapped to hers—red, glistening, burning with crippling shame—and she took his face in her hands.

She whispered, her voice broken and adamant, "You're allowed to hurt, too."

For a moment he only stared, quiet, solitary tears spilling numbly down his face. And then his hands closed over her wrists, his pupils blowing out and his lips parting to draw a choked breath, and she knew it was happening to him again.

"It's all right," she promised, feeling frantic, her own heart racing as she watched him recede into a veiled past—as she watched him struggle to push it down, smother it, before she could see the symptoms. "You don't have to hide it. Not from me."

His eyes flickered with indecision, holding her wrists like a lifeline while he grappled with the choice—wanting the solace she offered so badly but afraid of the inevitable consequences.

Then the memory crashed on him and he gave in, and all at once he was gasping, eyes wide with horror and hands clawing at the earth and at her as he searched for an anchor, as the temporary blindness that followed remembering took him someplace breathless, and she pressed her face into his, whispering soft reassurances into his ear through the storm. The adrenaline was tearing through him like a knife, and there was little she could do but hold him.

So she held him. She held him until his thrashing quieted to tremors, until the broken sobs turned to softer breaths, until the tension holding his spine taut suddenly gave and he collapsed into her neck. Her fingers knotted and splayed numbly in his hair. It was all very familiar.

"It was you," he choked out miserably, voice muffled in her skin. "It was _you_ and I just—how could I have forgotten this?"

His hands slipped around her waist, warm and firm through the fabric of her tunic, and he pressed an unrepentant kiss to her collarbone. She flushed at his sudden brazenness, leaning closer before he could remember himself and pull away. At least it had been a good memory. But she could still feel him riding the last dregs of panic. The telltale flying pulse. The shaky hands.

Long after the tears had dried and his breathing had calmed, his hands still tremored occasionally where they had come to rest on her hips, like the quiet aftershocks of an earthquake. His forehead was still on her shoulder, though they had shifted around somewhat, tangling in each other to make sitting still for so long more comfortable. He was either unwilling to move or too exhausted, and whatever the reason she wasn't complaining.

He finally murmured, "It's terrifying, realizing you're missing so much of yourself."

And not knowing what part of it you would suddenly be confronted with, no doubt. She could understand that. She stroked his head absently, reliving a memory of her own, and dipped her mouth close to his ear, eager for the distraction of his smooth skin, of his worn voice.

"Well?" she asked, so softly. "Can you face me?"

He drew back slowly, exhaling, and though his eyes were tired and his face tear-stained, his expression was serene. He brought a hand to her face, and in lieu of answering he kissed her.

It seemed fitting that fear should bring them so much closer together now; it had once before, in an era all but forgotten. If only every bout of fear could end this way. If only every spike of adrenaline and panic could resolve in the languid, heady rhythm in which they were reveling now, lips parting and breaths catching in all the right ways.

He brought his hands to her neck, deepening the kiss, and when they shook neither of them minded.


	2. Explosion

_Prompt No. 2_  
_Word count: ~500  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
__Pairings: None (but deep down we know he's thinking about Zelda amirite)  
__Rating: T for some blood  
__Themes: Injury, flash blindness, tinnitus_

**Explosion**

When most people imagined an explosion they pictured heat and fire and debris. They imagined burns and searing pain and lacerations. Most people had no idea what an explosion felt like.

An explosion was all concussive force and lightning. It was bruised bones and and blunt trauma and temporary blindness. It was bleeding ears and earthquakes that tore through his body that never seemed to end.

Link dragged himself deeper into the shadow of the wall, gasping for breath as the ringing and the starbursts ran their course. He could feel the telltale thumping of the Guardian's spindly approach through his hands, instinctively pressed to the dirt, still gathering intel while the rest of him lolled. Then he heard it, layered oddly on top of the high note screaming in his head, like raindrops pattering on a shield: the soft song of the targeting mechanism readying another shot.

He was in the middle of Hyrule Field, and he had inadvertently attracted the attention of two sentinels at once. There was no cover and he was bleeding out, and his last shield had been wasted by a clumsy parry. No, making a run for it was out of the question. He was lucky to have made it as far as these ruins. He would have to wait it out.

His eyes unfocused and his breath sped, the two toned song quickening, burned so deep in his brain that his vision turned red with the glare of a light he couldn't see. Waiting it out meant holding very still. Waiting it out meant not screaming when the blast felt like it punched a hole through his body. Waiting it out wasn't much of a strategy.

It just meant enduring the torture long enough to survive.

He clapped his hands over his ears and curled into himself, back pressed to the wall, and turned his face into the earth as the song crescendoed in sickening rhythm with his pulse.

He let himself scream the first time, as the blast rippled through him and showered him with brick and mortar, shattering him with the blunt force of a mallet dropped on his backbone. A second blast quickly followed, and a third, tearing the earth apart and shunting parts of him together that didn't belong that way. He was blind and deaf for the rest of the onslaught, counting the explosions as they drummed through his body, vibrating it like a string pulled taut over the neck of an instrument. He could feel the blood trickling through his fingers, through his teeth, and in his mind the drops made sounds as they slipped off him onto the dirt. The high note rang unendingly in his skull, and sometimes the rainpatter tones of the red light staccatoed over it when his vision flashed with color. An intricate, gruesome symphony.

When most people imagined an explosion they picture heat and fire and debris.

Most people had no idea what an explosion felt like.


	3. Delirium

_Prompt No.3  
Word count: ~1490  
__Universe: Ocarina of Time  
__Pairings: Zelink  
__Rating: T for some blood  
__Themes: Fever, delirium, infected wounds, shrapnel, foreign body removal_

**Delirium**

The fever had already begun to take him by the time he made his way out of the temple.

Her first night tending him was little more than an adrenaline-fueled blur to her now; his condition had deteriorated so much faster than she could have imagined. When she had dived from her hiding place after she saw him slump against the cave entrance, covered in a sheen of sweat and pale as a ghost, and slung his arm over her shoulders, he had given her a crooked smirk and murmured, "You should see the other guy."

She couldn't have known that it was so much more than exhaustion compelling him to lean so gratefully onto her shoulders. She couldn't have known that he had been walking around with a festering injury for days.

If she had known…

Sheik peeled away his tunic to examine the wound again, trying to ignore the weak groan that fell from his lips when the fabric pulled at the lesion. The potions and herbs were having little effect. The jagged edges where the blade had torn through his side were still inflamed and discolored, and flapping loosely like the tattered remains of a banner on a wasted battlefield. It just wasn't healing. He needed something more.

She would have to leave him—find a fairy fountain, or maybe a merchant who had happened across a stray...

He stirred, murmuring, and she brushed his bangs away from his forehead absently.

Then his eyes opened, just barely, the ice blue of his irises cutting through the lantern light like a poe's flame.

"Sheik," he whispered hoarsely, and she laid a hand softly on his shoulder, relieved.

She wanted to collapse beside him from exhaustion and weep, tell him how happy she was he was alive, apologize for everything her bad decisions had brought upon him and everyone else—but she didn't have the luxury. She wasn't the Princess now. She was his counselor.

"It was reckless to let a wound go untreated in a place like that," she murmured.

"No potions," he slurred quietly, his eyes lolling sideways, and she pursed her lips.

"Well, you need something stronger than that now. You need a fairy."

"No fairy," he whispered, eyes rolling back into his head, and she touched his face, trying to keep him lucid.

"I know. That's why I have to go."

"Why would the Great Deku Tree want to see you?"

She blinked at him. "What?"

"Mido thinks I killed him, but I—"

He shifted, the movement pulling at his injury, and he arched away from it, his face screwing in pain. He pushed himself up against the cave wall before she could stop him, remarkably steady despite the fever, and pressed his hands into his side like they were all that was holding him together.

"Don't touch it," she scolded him, closing his hands on his wrists, and his eyes split open again.

"Sheik?" he whispered, his eyes darting around the cave as though seeing it for the first time, seeing _her_ for the first time, and she swallowed.

"Stay with me, Link," she growled, only so her voice wouldn't wobble. "We're in the woods behind Kakariko. I need to get you a fairy—"

But then his eyes went wide, and he reached for her with a grimy, trembling hand, and touched her face. Her eyes widened, too, remembering that she had discarded her mask during her vigil the night before and had yet to replace it.

He whispered, the name spilling from his lips like a prayer, "_Zelda_."

For a moment she was frozen, suspended in the intensity of his stare. Then his expression flickered with discomfort, and she snatched her scarf with trembling hands, wrapping it swiftly around her nose and mouth. It would be fine. He was delirious with fever. He wouldn't remember. But the way he was looking at her…

"A fairy, Link," she repeated, not quite able to hide the tremor in her voice as she had her face. "Is there a fountain nearby?"

He slumped again, panting. "I understand why you didn't tell me. You had to protect yourself."

"Focus, Link—"

"After all," he scoffed, coughing weakly. "I abandoned you for seven years."

She sighed, closing her eyes. Did he have to seem so earnest, so _lucid_, when he was looking at her like that? His head lolled weakly, but his poe-fire eyes pierced right through her Sheikah armor into her soul.

She whispered, "That wasn't your fault."

"Rauru, the old one, he said I was… too young…" his head lolled again, eyes clouding beneath flickering lids. "Gods. It feels like the Crater in here."

"It's your fever," she reminded him, pressing her knuckles to his temple to gauge his temperature again, and he took her hand, sighing gently as he leaned into it.

"I didn't know where you were. I knew you had to hide yourself from him, but I still wanted…"

His eyes closed, chest rising and falling in great, staggered swells, and he was still for so long she wondered if he had slipped under again. But when she tried to take her hand back, he gave a small squeeze, and she let him hold on a while longer. When his eyes opened again, it was like staring into pools of the clearest, most tranquil water, and the peace in them took her breath away.

Then he sat up, dragged her mask off her chin with both hands, and pressed the softest kiss to the corner of her mouth.

For an instant neither of them spoke. His eyes harnessed hers with the purest, deepest fire, and even in the knowledge that he was delirious, that he was fighting a losing battle with a fever, that in all likelihood he wouldn't remember uncovering this lie in a matter of hours, she couldn't help but walk further into it, reveling in the way it burned.

Then he clapped his hand over his side and hissed, and she saw the red blooming through his tunic.

"Now you've done it," she muttered, breathless, dizzy with fear, and helped him to lie back down.

She peeled the tunic back again, trying to blot out his cries as the pain got inexplicably worse. Then she saw it, peeking out from amidst the oozing red, dislodged from its hiding place by his movement: a jagged, black piece of blade, still digging into the soft tissue of the wound.

"I'm never going to get to tell her," he groaned, tossing, and roared through his teeth when she spread the injury with nimble fingertips, exposing the shard. "Sheik, you have to… no, she would think… think I was too young… but I _wasn't_..."

She braced herself, trying to ignore the tiny flutterings erupting beneath her ribs with every word, and warned him, "Link, I'm going to pull this out."

She had treated broken bones and worse before, on herself and on others. She knew how to make it quick and clean, and how to numb herself to a patient's screams. So the blood cascading over her bandaged fingertips and his gasps and whimpers of pain when she grasped the corroded metal didn't bother her.

What broke her was the scream that echoed through the cavern when she steeled herself and pulled, and that the name he called out was hers.

Time was of the essence now. She pinched the wound shut as he went boneless, tears spilling from her eyes, and begged him, "Link, please. I need to get you a fairy, or you're going to die. Do you understand?"

His eyes split open tiredly, searching her face for a breathless half-second, before they closed again.

"Graveyard…" he panted. "Northwest tomb…"

In the next instant she was gone, her shadow slipping out of the cave into the cover of night.

The fairy made quick work of the injury, and of his fever. He woke the next morning, sore, but functional, and well out of danger. He smiled blearily at her as he came to, examining her familiar, obscured face in the splash of sunlight spilling into the mouth of the cave, and hesitantly prodded the bandage where the last of the damage was still healing.

"Don't touch," she growled, exhausted, and his smile widened.

"It seems I'm in your debt again," he murmured. "Thank you, Sheik."

She sighed quietly, overtired and emotionally drained, and averted her eyes. "I'd rather not make a habit of this."

"Sorry for causing you trouble. I don't remember much, which probably means it was bad."

He moved tentatively, testing the limits of his injury, and wisely decided to stay put. Then a puzzled expression crossed his face, and he tucked his elbow under his head.

"It's strange, the tricks your mind plays on you," he murmured. "I could have sworn you were…"

She waited, scarcely daring to breathe. "I was what?"

"Never mind," he said, quiet as the wind. "It was stupid of me."


	4. Human Shield

_Prompt No.4_  
_Word count: ~585  
Universe: Legend of Zelda  
__Pairings: Zelink, but only a tiny bit  
__Rating: T, because there's blood and I'm paranoid  
__Themes: Punishment, obedience conditioning, helplessness, stab wound_

**Human Shield**

It wasn't that she was in danger that frightened him, because frankly she always seemed to be in danger. It wasn't that the latest in what had admittedly become a long line of ambitious villains had his arm wrapped around her throat—she always found herself in some compromised position or other, and when he would tease her about it later, she would counter that she only let it happen because she liked seeing the doting worry in his eyes when he came to her rescue.

It was the way her mouth fell open in a gut-wrenching, breathless gasp when the dagger plunged into her side—when the villain had warned him not to take another step closer, and he had had the gall to disobey.

His blood froze in his veins, and Zelda loosed a shuddering, quiet breath when her captor pulled the dagger free, pressing her mouth into his restraining arm to keep from making any more noise than that.

"Don't do that again," Link growled, fear tempering the threat in his voice.

"Don't disobey me again," the villain countered simply, wiping the bloodied blade on the billowy pleats of her skirt, and Link felt the first crack, like a dark, spidery crevice on a porcelain doll. "Drop your sword."

He frowned, making a show of holding the blade away at full arm's length and letting it fall with a blaring clatter to the floor. The villain nodded, satisfied, and he repeated the ritual with his shield when he demanded it.

"Step away," the villain instructed plainly, and, briefly meeting the sullen, shuttered gaze of his princess, Link swallowed salt and his pride, and obeyed, and another jagged split tore through him. It wasn't much, a few feet at most, and their captor's lip twitched in amusement. "Again."

His teeth were clenched so hard they felt near to cracking, but he did. Another crack. Another smug order and another capitulation. Another dark vein, breaking him in two. The villain took Zelda by the neck, forcing her to take the lead, and his vision swam rosy when she grimaced with the first step, her wound seeping onto her immaculate dress.

They stopped mere inches away. Zelda's gaze was hard as flint, screaming an order he recognized at once. _Don't give him what he wants_. But how could he not? His overconfidence, his _arrogance_, had gotten them into this mess. And he hadn't the wisdom to get them out of it.

"Now," the villain purred, "apologize to your princess."

His stomach roiled.

"I'm sorry," he murmured, and the villain tsked.

"Like you mean it."

His breath trembled out of him, trapped between the usurper's demands and his princess's, still shouting at him from diamond-hard eyes that brimmed with tears. _Don't give up_. But the villain's dagger still glinted with the sunlight streaming in through the great picture windows hanging over the throne room, and the blood staining her dress just kept blooming, and the fractures spreading through him with every compliance were far more crippling than anything that bled. The guardsmen bound his wrists, the way the iron bit deep into his flesh a glimmer of what awaited him. But he knew he wouldn't be led away. Not until he admitted to her what a fool he had been. Not until he saw the disappointment on her face. Not until he could see her fear.

"I'm sorry," he told her, so quietly, as though it were just between them. "I'm so sorry, Zelda."


	5. Gunpoint

_Prompt No.5_  
_Word count: ~1315  
Universe: Majora's Mask  
__Pairings: None  
__Rating: T for blood and character death  
__Themes: Character death, gunshot wounds_

**Gunpoint**

"_Yesss! My security system is impenetrable!_"

The Sun's Mask tumbled off the edge of the conveyor, and Kafei blanched. The grinning thief's laughter filled the cavern, an unexpected baritone sound that lilted gently like his prancing. It disappeared into nothing like the mask had.

"...We're locked in," Kafei murmured, meeting his eyes sadly, penitently, through the panes of glass separating them. "I'm sorry you got caught up in all this."

Link sighed. He knew there was nothing he could say to temper Kafei's regret. He knew he wouldn't even remember it, come the next dawn. He knew he was going to try anyway. "I know you think Anju won't accept you without the mask, but she'll understand—"

"If you can get out, then do it," he growled, and then regretted the burst of anger and sighed. The hollow silence in that cavern felt like another trap. "Anju is already fleeing to Cremia's ranch."

Tatl alighted softly on his shoulder. She wasn't much for comfort, usually, but she knew that there was something more pushing Link into this quest than merely helping someone in need. She saw the way his eyes changed when he watched Kafei; she saw the way he stared at him as though he were staring into a mirror.

"Let's go back," she murmured into his ear. "You know about the rigged switches now. You can warn him next time."

He nodded, reaching gingerly for the Ocarina. One more cycle. He would get it right. He refused to believe that their story was doomed to play out this way—refused to believe that, no matter how hard Kafei fought, he would never be able to dispel the misery in Anju's eyes. Never be able to keep his promise...

The Ocarina was gone. He whirled, searching the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Then the door to Kafei's side of the room opened, and Sakon sauntered inside with that stupid grin on his face.

"You," Kafei roared, launching himself into an attack, but Sakon waved something unfamiliar in his face.

"Ah ah!" he berated him, and Kafei skidded to a halt, narrowing his red eyes.

"What's that supposed to be?"

"Something I, heh… _acquired_ from the Bomb Shop in town. A delightful little invention, actually," he murmured, grin widening, and got down on one knee to show him the smooth, glistening metal. "A little gunpowder here, some very dangerous bits of metal go there," he gave the barrel a spin and then snapped it shut with a flick of his wrist. "They called it a revolver. A little less ambitious than bomb-powered space flight, but quite a lot more practical, if you ask me."

"What are you _talking_ about?" Tatl crowed.

Sakon snatched Kafei by his hair before he could get any ideas, laughing gently at the way he kicked and threw punches with limbs that were too short, and Link's stomach roiled, getting that look in his eyes again—the one where he was looking into a mirror.

"And you," he grinned through the glass. "I don't suppose you were looking for your instrument? That delicate little ocarina?"

Link gritted his teeth. That place was full of booby traps and strange mechanisms, though exactly which one had distracted him so thoroughly he lost that precious key _to time itself _completely eluded him. Sakon produced the ocarina from his belt. It glinted in the lantern light like the sacred thing that it was, silently condemning him for being negligent enough to lose it in the first place.

"It's precious to you," he mused quietly, tilting his smooth head. "It isn't plated with gold like the Sun's Mask, to be sure, but it must be worth something. I've seen you change shape and summon Garo, and even appear out of thin air…"

Sakon tossed Kafei forward, raising his new weapon meaningfully to the back of his head, and Link frowned. He had been careless, reasoning that no one would remember what they had seen. He never guessed that it would come back to haunt him in the short span of one cycle.

"Tell me what the ocarina does," he demanded quietly, "or I'll have to do some persuading."

"It doesn't do anything," he murmured, his voice gravel.

"Then why is it so precious to you?"

"It's _sentimental_."

All at once his face changed, pupils constricting and mouth pulling down into a hideous snarl, the way the Happy Mask Salesman's did when he was angry. And in the span of a breath he had pulled the revolver away from the back of Kafei's head, angled it toward his calf, and pulled the trigger.

The deafening peal of the weapon and Kafei's scream as the bullet ripped through his leg blended into one terrible noise that jarred him down to his bones and sucked the air right out of his lungs. Tatl shrieked, her sun-gold glow turning pale as moonlight. Sakon grabbed Kafei by the hair again, lurching him forward until he was pressed against the barrier, and as he caught himself with his hands, wrapped protectively around his injury seconds earlier, they smeared red on the glass.

"Tell me how to use it, or the next one goes through his head!"

"Don't give him what he wants!" Kafei shouted, voice breaking through the pain. "Now that we know about this place, he'll never let us go!"

Link pounded a fist uselessly against the glass, breathless and dizzy with dread, and stared at his red-eyed reflection on the other side. They were both men trapped in children's bodies; both consumed by their unfulfilled promises; both chasing after something precious that always seemed just out of reach.

He had to believe that Kafei's story wasn't doomed to play out this way, because it was too much like his.

"I need that ocarina!" he cried, too desperately. "The moon is about to crash into the world, and I'm the only one who can stop it!"

"Don't test me, boy!"

"It's the truth! The Ocarina can call the Four Giants from where they sleep—"

His mouth pulled into that hideous frown again, and Tatl screamed.

"_Link!_"

There was another earsplitting peal of thunder, and this time Kafei didn't scream.

The air sucked out of the room. It tasted like static and hot metal. He was laying in a pile on the floor, his face hidden beneath a spill of purple hair, and all at once Link was staring into a mirror again.

"The glass—" Tatl's frantic shriek broke through his stupor, "_the glass!_"

It had cracked. Link barreled headlong into it, following Tatl's green glow as it bobbed around the hole and spidery tendrils, and the barrier shattered under his shoulder. He plowed into Sakon before he could fire another round, clambering after the Ocarina as it spilled out of his hand. He flipped onto his back and played with tremoring fingers, the song whistling out of the instrument in a gasping whirlwind, and as the last notes erupted from the voicing Sakon whipped the revolver towards him and fired.

His scream was lost in the roar of time unwinding around him, pulling him upstream in the unending river and dropping him breathlessly into nothing at once.

It was dawn in front of the Clock Tower, and his hands flew to his middle, where the bullet had torn a hole right through him, both moments ago and three days in his future at once. He held his breath, waiting. A purple-haired boy wearing a Keaton Mask emerged from the Laundry Pool, holding a letter.

Link loosed a shaky breath and collapsed at the door, and Tatl wilted onto his shoulder, squeaking with tiny sobs.

He stared through the colorful Clock Town banners, painted with too much red.

He wondered if his story was doomed to play out that way—wondered if he was doomed to never fulfill his promise after all.


	6. Dragged Away

_Prompt No.6_  
_Word count: ~700  
Universe: Ocarina of Time  
__Pairings: None  
__Rating: T for blood  
__Themes: Injury, fear, being eaten alive_

**Dragged Away**

Link gripped his thigh with both hands, trying to stave off the bleeding. He was alone, for now. The deep, dark quiet of the Forest Temple, the cool dampness of it, reminded him of home in a way. If home was more like the castle, and full of hungry spirits and horrors.

The wound oozed red and black, and he tipped his head back against the wall as the room spun. He knew he shouldn't scream. He knew he shouldn't cry.

He had been an adult for all of three days, after all, and adults did neither of those things.

His closed his eyes and just tried to breathe. Two ghosts down. That meant he was halfway to finding Saria. Hyrule was so vast, and the prospect of braving another four temples after this place almost too horrifying to contemplate, but Saria was his friend, and she needed him. He focused on that, drank a little solace from it. And then a chill ran down his neck, the stirring of a cool wind passing over clammy skin, and his eyes split open.

He wasn't alone.

With trembling breath, he braced himself on the wall and hobbled to his feet, still holding his leaking wound with one hand, and started to move. Every step was a hot poker shunting up his leg.

And whatever was in the room with him was getting closer.

He couldn't see it, couldn't smell a wet pelt or an old flame or rotting flesh; but he could hear it, feel the disturbance in the air as it moved, rustling the creeping ivy and breathing on him from somewhere, and the dread of it was sitting like a stone in the pit of his stomach.

He hobbled faster, panting after the door. The air around him moaned, _breathed_, until he could feel the vibrations passing through him, until he felt he was already in the maw. A shadow spilled over his feet, dogging his every step, pulsing, growing in tandem with the sound rattling his bones. It veiled his face like a dark hand: blotting out light, closing around his mouth until he couldn't breathe, couldn't scream. And then it finally descended on him.

Four massive claws punctured him from shoulder to thigh, the last digging into his open wound, and the fist closed around him before he could draw breath to scream. He could hardly see what it was that had him—something dark, a spindly hand formed of shadow, lingering in shadow, _dragging him_ toward shadow.

He managed to pry an arm free, grasping frantically at the floor tiles for a nonexistent hold, tormented by the sickening _drag_ and _thump_ of the hand lurching him backward. He couldn't reach his sword. His bones felt crushed. He forced out a pathetic cry, hoping someone might hear—the gods, maybe—and the hand squealed in morbid delight.

Then all at once the floor was gone, pulled out of his reach and shrinking as he tumbled towards darkness. The hand pulsed and squeezed around him, and he was vaguely aware of something leaving him, of a guttural, whispering slurp as it drank from him. When its hold eased enough for him to breathe he would scream, and cry, and do all the things adults weren't supposed to do, and it would gurgle another squeal through its mouthful. He didn't know how long it went on, only that he was awake for all of it and that fear and pain of his earlier wound paled next to the horror and agony of being eaten alive. Then, when he felt spent and boneless and hardly human, it dropped him, and he fell through darkness, into darkness.

He woke at the temple's entrance, whole and corporeal. He made a quick assessment of his limbs and organs, and when he was finally convinced they were all still present, he let his head collapse on the soft cushion of the forest floor.

Tears leaked, fresh and globular, out of the corners of his eyes as he stared at the tranquil blue sky. He missed Saria. He missed the seven years the gods had stolen.

He missed whatever the Wallmaster had taken from him.


	7. Isolation

_Prompt No.7_  
_Word count: ~1465  
Universe: Majora's Mask  
Pairings: Slightly Zelink  
Rating: T  
Themes: Sensory deprivation, touch deprivation, whipping/scourging_

**Isolation**

It was like being in a cocoon.

After the trauma of the scourging it was a relief: no sight, no sounds, no smells, no tastes. Even his sense of touch had been numbed, making it near impossible to tell if he was on his feet, or hanging from his wrists, or flat on his back. It was soothing, in a way. It was peaceful.

He had reveled in it at first. But his sanctuary quickly became his prison.

There was never light. He never heard a cell door, or voices, or his own breath. They never fed him and the air was tasteless. It was blindness, and deafness, and numbness, and impairments he didn't even have words for. It was a mind trapped in a shell, starving for input—and, left without recourse, eventually feeding on itself.

Sometimes he thought he might be dead, condemned to float in some endless void for eternity, never seeing, never feeling, never hearing. But then things would change. A glimmer of light through the haze on his eyes, a murmur through the ocean bearing down on his ears, a throbbing tug on his wrists and a shuffling of where his feet ought to have been—the veil, lifting so gently, so that when the whip came cracking down on his back again, he could feel it.

Even though he couldn't hear it, he was absolutely sure he screamed the first time. He felt the vibrations of it in his chest, thrumming in time with the lashes tearing his flesh apart until he thought his throat must be bleeding. And then, when he was sure his skin had melted off from the fire lit on his back, the veil would fall back into place, shutting his eyes, stopping his ears, dousing the fire and every other sense he had, and he was back in the cocoon again.

But everything became less clear after that. Was the light he saw from torchlight, or was it light from his mind, from the searing pain of the whip? Was he screaming, or did he simply wish he could? When they left him long enough, he would long for those questions, for those moments of uncertainty, where every scrap of feeling was precious, where every moment of pain was pleasure. The bindings holding him taut by the wrists were cold. The air tasted stale. Sometimes the wind whistled before the lash met his skin.

If he wasn't dead, it was certainly some foreign magic. They hadn't gauged his eyes out, to the best of his knowledge, or taken his hands or his feet or his nose. And his skin was still there, if the burn of the whip was any indication. And how could he survive for so long without food or water? He knew of a place with such strange wonders. He remembered being there. He just couldn't remember if they were the ones holding him captive now.

Then, one day, light and color burst horrifying through his eyes again, showing him a vengeful goddess and her wrathful enemy, deteriorating in the brilliance of her light, and he heard the weak, hoarse cry that pulled from his own throat.

He could have wept at the familiarity of his own voice.

He shuffled back as fast as his sudden corporeality would allow, only stopping when his back, riddled now with so many scars, touched a wall. He kept his eyes pinched shut, afraid to open them, afraid of the searing pain of the light. He listened to himself pant, to the extraordinary sound of his own breath, of his heartbeat pulsing like a river through his ears. He felt the stirring of the air, suddenly so fresh, tasting of grass and wildflowers, as something, someone, came near.

Her voice was barely a whisper, as though she knew that the full force of it might well tear him apart.

"Link?"

His throat closed and his teeth ground on themselves until he thought they might crack, his mind reeling at the sound, at the _word_, at the _name_.

"Link," came the voice again, so soft and beautiful it could have been an angel's. A goddess's. "You need to take that mask off."

Then it came, like the gentlest bolt of lightning: a soothing touch, caressing his jaw, so softly, feeling along the subtle ridge that ran beneath his chin.

His mouth fell open with a gasp and his whole body rolled into the sensation, arching off the floor to be closer to it. Her other hand joined the first, encouraged by his reaction, or perhaps frightened by it, and he groaned as the feeling of simply _being touched_ rippled through every nerve. Every hair on his body stood on end, electrified by the contact. Who was she, that she could make him feel this way? How long had it been, that he had forgotten the simple, unadulterated pleasure of being touched?

Gently, she peeled the second layer off his face, and he felt himself change—not jarringly, not drastically. Just a drain of magic, a sudden chill as his clothes disappeared, a warmth as blood flooded his face. Her hands closed tentatively on his neck, drawing him closer, and he hesitantly obeyed—still flailing, still lolling. She brought his face to her neck and the sound that left him was something between a gasp and a sob. He inhaled the honeyed scent of her skin, pressed his eyes into its softness, reached blindly to thread his fingers in her silken hair. She ran her fingers down his arm and a frisson spread like carnival fireworks over every inch of him.

"Link," she whispered, that sweet, _angelic_ sound, and drifted gently away. "Open your eyes."

He was scared of the light, of the burning pain of a few moments ago when the veil that had shielded his eyes for so long was sudden ripped away. But he didn't want to disobey. Didn't want to risk going back to the way things were.

He peeled them open, blinking once, twice, until the woman he had mistaken for a goddess before came back into view. She looked different; her eyes weren't glowing with that ancient fury, or her skin radiating that molten light. But she was familiar.

She smiled encouragingly at him, but her eyes were unmistakably sad. "Do you know who I am?"

He went back in time—and not the way he used to, either, with sacred swords and ocarina songs. Simply through memory. Before the world went dark. Before he had forgotten what it meant to have a body.

She was more beautiful than he remembered, more mature. Her eyes were wiser, her lips fuller, her simple but radiant garb more elegant. But there was no mistaking her fair features. He whispered, "Princess."

She nodded brokenly, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. "Zelda."

"Zelda," he agreed hoarsely, enjoying the fleeting sensation of her name on his tongue.

Then her face crumpled, and she took his face carefully in her hands—like she knew it was almost more than he could handle, like she expected the harsh draw of breath that followed and the ragged exhale.

"I'm so sorry. I looked for you. I wanted to know if you were safe. And then I found this place and—and they said the moon had been hanging over them for _seven years_, and I just—" she gulped air, tears streaming down her face. He mustered the courage to touch her face, eyes widening and lips parting at the sensation of the moisture on his fingertips. She watched, trembling, wide-eyed, as he shakily brought his fingers back to his mouth and tasted the salt, and then closed his eyes like that flavor was the epitome of decadence. Her face crumpled again. "I'm so sorry."

He wouldn't have taken his eyes off her, mesmerized by her beauty and by the mere fact that she had saved him from whatever that nightmare had been, but her eyes fixed on the floor, and he followed their lead. A pale mask framed in silver hair and tribal markings stared up at them. A Deity, forged to battle a Demon.

"Is…" his throat felt so swollen and unpracticed, it took him several more tries to form the words, but she waited, hanging on every word. "Is it over? Did you…?"

"_Yes_," she promised fervently, touching his mouth, and his body lolled again. It was such a near-painful rush he could barely keep his eyes open. But it only made her cry harder.

She linked her hands with his under the tree in the middle of the field, in the middle of a dream, of a playground from a child's imagination, and painfully slowly, gingerly, she coaxed a starved hero off the surface of the Moon.


	8. Stab Wound

_Prompt No.8  
Word count: ~1225  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Stab wounds, trauma, guilt, healing and fluff_

**Stab Wound**

The Lizalfos was sprawled at her feet, its sinewy tongue lolling out of its mouth and its three-pronged boomerang lodged in the hollow of its throat. As far as first forays into unarmed combat with venomous, amoral enemies went, she thought she handled herself rather well. Aside from the gushing stab wound in her side, staining her clothes with a sodden red bloom that was growing by the second, you would hardly guess she had been in a fight at all.

She loosed a shuddering breath when she was satisfied it was dead, eased herself to the ground, and started rehearsing.

_It's not as bad as it looks. No, I'm not hurt anywhere else. I'll be fine._

She knew, no matter what she said, he would be furious—not with her, of course. He would find some way to heap all the blame on himself, just shy of leaving a crumb trail to her for the Lizalfos to follow. But she hoped she could at least temper the inevitable downward spiral with some logical reasoning.

But one look in his eyes as he entered the mouth of the cave and took in the grisly scene, and she knew that logic would have nothing to do with it.

For a moment she was frozen, her mind emptying as they stared at each other. Her eyes felt wide as saucers; his were hard as steel. Then all at once he moved, skidding to his knees beside her, and the misfire in her brain untangled itself, lodged reassurances bubbling to the surface.

"Really, Link," she managed, finally, doing her best to sound unperturbed, "it's not as bad as it—"

She cut off with a broken gasp when he applied gentle pressure to the fringes of the wound, assessing the damage, and the harsh look he gave her was unmistakable. She shut up at once, holding her breath as he peeled her tunic away to get a better look.

"Lie down," he murmured, and proceeded to do most of the work of shifting to the floor for her.

She stared up at the cave ceiling, trying not to claw at the dirt or cry as he gingerly cleaned the wound for bandaging, and sighed. It was just as bad as it looked, and the truth was she was hurting everywhere, and if she was going to be fine it was only thanks to his unparalleled caretaking. His hands were deft, wrapping her midsection with the sort of precision she had come to expect from him.

When his work was done he dragged the Lizalfos out by the tail—and possibly gutted it, if the sounds coming from outside the cave were any indication. He coaxed the fire back to life when he returned, stationing himself at arm's length. Falling back into old habits. Reflexively morphing back into the knight of an era past, instead of the companion who had begun leaving those boundaries behind.

She sighed again, wincing as the exaggerated motion aggravated the injury.

"You couldn't have known."

"I never should have left you behind without a weapon."

"I _asked _you to go while there was still daylight."

"I listened."

He met her eyes, finally, frowning, and she lost the will to argue with him. He was so stubborn, and she was so exhausted, and the pain radiating out from her side was turning everything hazy. All she wanted, all she _needed_, was what she had spent the better part of two months trying to rekindle, and in the span of a heartbeat all her efforts felt undone. And suddenly, she was the one who was furious.

"You're an idiot," she choked out, bitterly, tears leaking from her eyes, and with tempered satisfaction she saw his eyes widen a fraction. "I spent a hundred years fighting Ganon, and you think I can't handle this? That this isn't _nothing _compared to what I've already been through?"

"It isn't about what you can _handle_," he bit back, incredulous. "It's my duty to protect you!"

"You can't protect me from everything, Link! You certainly couldn't protect me from him!"

"And do you think that hasn't haunted me every day since?"

His eyes were like ice, half veiled in trembling shadow, and it made her tirade lodge in her throat.

"Do you think whenever I felt the burn of his malice, or whenever I have to wake you up because you're screaming in the middle of the night, that I don't think of what my failure put you through and hate myself for it?"

Her face crumpled, the first few tears turning into a torrent, and she managed, breathless, before she turned over to face away from him, "Oh, I could _slap _you."

The movement made her stab wound scream, but she was too miserable to go back to looking at him. She heard him loose a gravelly sigh—he knew it hurt her, because of course he knew—and a second later his arms were around her again, trying to coax her back to a more comfortable position.

"Don't do that," he scolded her quietly, but she shoved him away with all her might.

"You don't like that, do you?" she snapped when he grimaced, when the brunt of her rejection rained traitorously into his stomach. "When someone you want to be close to pushes you away?"

He was quiet a moment, watching her, digesting, his arms fixed where he held her, before he whispered, "I'm not trying to push you away."

"And do you know what the worst part is?" she cried. "That you're using what I've been through, what I've been trying so—_so _hard to just _forget_, as an excuse to keep me at arm's length! Well, I don't want your penance! I just want—_I want_—"

She buried her fists in her eyes, gasping. And he still just sat there like an idiot, frozen.

"_You_, stupid!" she sobbed, beating him on the shoulder with what energy she had left, which admittedly wasn't much. "I want you, and no one else, and I'm tired of being the reason you punish yourself! When I wake up screaming, I don't want your guilt—I want you to put your arms around me and—and—"

She buried her face in her hands again, breathless, and so slowly, so gently, he scooped her up in his arms and pull her onto his lap. They both flinched when the movement jostled her injury, but he didn't let her go.

"And what, Zelda?"

She met his eyes, so soft and tumultuous and blue, and dragged her sleeve ineffectually over her eyes, hiccuping. "And nothing. This is enough."

He pulled her in closer, letting her head rest on his shoulder, and they both sighed shakily at the resolution of it. He kissed the crown of her head.

"You're so stubborn."

She sniffled. "So are you."

He paused, listening to the fire crackle. Then, "You know how I feel about you."

She settled further into him, letting his warmth relax every taut muscle, and sighed. "Do I?"

He puffed a humorless laugh.

"If you don't," he murmured in her ear, tightening his arms around her, "then you're an idiot, too."

The stab wound pulsed in her side, but it felt dull.

It was nothing compared to the wounds that were finally beginning to mend in them now.


	9. Shackled

_Prompt No.9  
Word count: ~1410  
Universe: Ocarina of Time  
Pairings: None  
Rating: T  
Themes: Torture, and torture. Did I mention torture?_

**Shackled**

He was chained at the ankles, at the wrists, at the neck, dragged through dark, blood-stained corridors that smelled of earth and echoed with screams. His pulse slogged through his throat and his ears, stammering every time they shoved him over an abyss onto a platform that was invisible to the naked eye. Sometimes he could hear familiar whispers through the walls.

The Sheikah were feared with good reason, and imprisonment in their Temple was a sentence worse than death.

They reached their apparent destination, fastening his shackles to hooks in the ceiling, in the floor, spreading his arms so his shoulders were ripe for whipping and his head was bent to stare at the ground. When the cell door slammed closed behind him he was left in total darkness.

For a long time there was nothing but the sound of his own panting and his hammering heart. Then, finally, cutting through the shadows,

"Time travel is a fickle art."

Link gritted his teeth, unable to keep from wincing. He knew mockery was the least of his worries; but it still cut deep into a fresh wound.

"But look who I'm telling."

A single torch sparked across the room, splashing trembling light and shadow into the dark without reaching the deepest corners of it. His interrogator's silhouette blotted out most of its glow; his figure was lithe, bound in traditional Sheikah garb. He reminded him of someone else.

"It's the truth," he murmured hoarsely. "Your refusal to believe it doesn't change that."

"Do you know what truth the King of Hyrule believes?" he said, muting the torchlight further with a gentle wave of his hand. "That you're a thief and a trespasser."

"I didn't steal anything. They were given to me. And as for the other…" he sighed, cursing his own foolishness. "I thought I would be welcomed."

"She said she's never seen you before."

He flinched again, remembering the eyes that weren't quite the right shade of blue, the gentle twist of soft, bemused features, painful in their similarness. The absolute lack of recognition. His answer was barely a whisper.

"It was just a misunderstanding."

"The accusations leveled against you are quite serious. Stealing sacred treasures and scaling the castle walls into the Princess's bedchambers are not so easily explained away." He moved away from the torchlight, slipping so easily, as Sheikah often did, into the shadows. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once. "They're saying you're a would-be assassin."

He strained against his chains, blood boiling, but it was a useless effort. He couldn't move.

"I would _never_," he hissed, powerless and furious. "I have been _nothing _but loyal to Hyrule!"

"So you've said," he mused, traces of a smile on his voice. "What was it you called yourself? The Hero of Time?"

He loosed a hopeless breath, letting his weight hang on the shackles. "That was another time."

"Explain it to me again."

"I've already told you. My account was true."

"But you haven't told me," he murmured, kneeling near his face so he could look into his eyes, glimmering with a red hue the color of blood, framed with a streak of pale hair. He tipped his head up with a finger beneath his chin, forcing him to strain against the metal biting into his neck. "You haven't told the Sheikah."

Then he was gone again, and Link was left staring powerlessly into the floor, his heart jammed in his throat. Because he knew this place, had seen with his own eyes the remnants of the horrors that they were still using in this time. He knew what they were capable of. He knew that it was a threat.

"I'm from a future where the kingdom was usurped by a Gerudo warlock," he sighed, tired of spouting a tale no one believed. "I drew the Master Sword at the behest of the Princess and was trapped for seven years in the Sacred Realm. I freed the five sages who could not hear the awakening call, and I faced the Evil King in battle and emerged victorious. And then the Princess used the Ocarina of Time to send me back to my own era. But…"

"Yes?"

"I don't know," he whispered. "Something must have gone wrong. She sent me back too far. And this body hasn't changed."

"You sound insane."

"I know."

"Treason," the Sheikah murmured, running a cool finger down his bare spine, "is a serious offense."

"I'm _innocent_."

"No one is innocent," he scoffed. "You drew a sword that had been holding a seal in place for a thousand years. The damage might have been irreversible if they hadn't replaced it in its pedestal when they did."

"I didn't draw it in this era," he insisted, for the umpteenth time since this whole thing began. "It came with me through time! There can't be two of them at once—it must have been some kind of a paradox. If I could get back to my own time—"

"And how do you plan on getting home, Hero?"

"I don't know," he bit out, voice tremoring. "I thought maybe the Princess…"

He closed his eyes, sighing. He was exhausted, weak from hunger, and creeping closer to hopelessness by the day. And now he was a prisoner in the House of the Dead, a living annal of Hyrule's bloody history of greed and hatred.

"If anyone understands truth, it's you," he whispered, defeated. "Your lenses and masks that cut through illusion and darkness and show what lies beneath… why don't you use one of those?"

"Those devices are useful," he conceded. "And we have others. Do you know the Stone of Agony, as well?"

He did. It was a horrible thing that he could barely stand to touch, that he wrapped in a thick cloth and kept sealed away, and that would rattle eagerly when he was near something concealed. Something it could expose. A secret it could pry out of its hiding place.

He hadn't realized it was a torture device. But it made sense, in hindsight.

The Sheikah didn't wait for him to answer. He plunged it between his shoulder blades, where the involuntary contraction of muscle and bone held it agonizingly in place, and Link threw his head back against the metal band around his neck and screamed. Fear and ice slithered down his spine and unspooled in his stomach, whipping tendrils in all directions, sticking to the inside of his ribs and the back of his throat and the joints of his hips and holding him taut. Teeth and shadows tore him apart from the inside out, peeling flesh and tendons away from where they belonged and lancing organs, rearranging his insides until nothing was where it ought to have been and he felt driven through by a thousand skewers.

After a few minutes he took the stone away and Link was pulled back from the brink of death, gasping, panting, weeping, Farore's name falling unbidden again and again from his mouth as his whole body shook.

The Sheikah sat cross legged on the floor beneath his face, watching him come back to himself, waiting until he was coherent before he spoke again.

"You must have thought yourself very brave, once," he murmured, brushing tears from his chin. "But I think you understand now why the Sheikah are feared. Why we dwell in a place like this."

"_Please_," Link whispered, pitifully and without shame. "I have nothing to confess. What I told you was true."

"I know," he mused. "If there had been, the Stone would have pulled it from you."

He trembled. "Then why?"

"Maybe I believe you," the Sheikah murmured, leaning very close. "Maybe I knew who you were from the beginning. Maybe the Goddesses have a mission for me, as well."

Link's eyes widened a fraction, hardly able to form the words. "What do you mean?"

"I'll send you home, once my work is complete," he promised, turning the artifact between lithe fingers. "Most people don't know why this place is called the Shadow Temple."

He stood, pacing a slow circle around his panting victim, and frowned.

"They think we worship shadows here, but we don't," he murmured. "We create them."

Then he slid the Stone back into place, watching him scream himself hoarse as it slowly rent his soul in two, and began the long, arduous process of fabricating a Shadow worthy of him, so that he might one day defeat himself.


	10. Unconscious

_Prompt No.10  
Word count: ~995  
Universe: Legend of Zelda  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: T  
Themes: Imprisonment, torture, beatings, whipping, fainting_

**Unconscious**

Unconsciousness, he was beginning to think, was a very good thing.

At first it startled him. The darkness when he slipped under. The disorientation when he woke again. The disconnect of knowing a chunk of your life was missing. But there were some things that weren't worth remembering.

He held his middle with a groan and leaned closer to the wall, using it like a shield to keep the blows from half his body. One of them kicked him again where one of his ribs had already cracked, and his vision danced white and starlit, blinding him with a different sort of momentary unconsciousness, the sort that he could feel all over.

But he couldn't bring himself to fight back. These were Hyrule's soldiers. He had sworn his life the same as they had. Even now, when Hyrule had turned on him, it felt like a sin to retaliate against those he would have given his life for not a week ago.

"He's had enough," one of them barked, which he knew from experience wasn't exactly a call to cease.

They yanked him off the wall by his hair, and something less yielding than fists or boots bludgeoned him across the head, and with a quick twist of his neck the floor turned dark again.

The unconsciousness was nice. It was quiet. I didn't hurt, until he woke up. It passed the time, which went by gruelingly slowly the rest of the time.

When he woke he was hanging from his wrists, brought jarringly back to consciousness by a frigid splash of water to the face, and hardly before he had time to orient himself the wildfire of the whip came down on his bare shoulders with a crack. The cry he loosed was as startled as it was pained, and as he dragged his face back to the whipping post to brace himself for the next, he saw a glimmer of regret in the eyes of the young soldier with the water bucket. Because they knew who he was. They knew what he had done. And sometimes the punishment did seem a bit unbalanced, given all he had already sacrificed.

The whip came down again, and his cry rumbled in his throat, and the young soldier flinched again.

"If you had known your place," his tormentor reminded him—a much more seasoned soldier, one who had seen enough horrors to numb himself to the ones he was incurring now—and brought the whip down again, "you could have spared yourself this."

Of course he knew that.

He only wondered if any of them would have been stronger in his place.

The whip came down again, and again, and again, melting his back to ribbons, and he clawed uselessly at the post. He had lost count, so he wasn't precisely sure how far away the darkness was, but he could feel it coming again. Between the broken bones around his lungs, the weight on his wrists, and the burn on his back, it didn't feel very far at all.

And then the whip came down again and he was gone.

The next time he woke must have been close to midnight.

The sparse light entering his cell and the quiet outside betrayed the sleepiness of the guards and the world outside. He groaned quietly as the fire on his back began to light again in tandem with his consciousness. Then a cool touch brushed the bangs away from his forehead, and the dazzling, blinding white of before struck him in another way entirely.

He grabbed at the cell bars, panting through the pain as he pulled himself to his knees and got closer to the silhouette on the other side. Her hands—so soft and perfect and soothing in that place that was burning him alive—cupped his face as he pressed it into the bars.

He trembled, "Zelda. How did you—?"

"The night warden," she whispered, leaning close to leave a tentative, delicate kiss to the corner of his mouth, where he seemed the least damaged.

Yes, he had known the night warden. They tortured him because Hyrule demanded it, not because they were heartless. He couldn't say he wouldn't have done the same, in their position.

"Then I owe him," he said, managing a breathless smile, but his Princess's brow puckered.

"This is all my fault," she whispered, tears spilling from her eyes, but he scoffed at her.

"I knew what I was getting myself into."

She pressed closer, and he mirrored her, touching through the bars where they could, forehead to forehead, fingertips to fingertips, hesitantly, fearfully, breathlessly, mouth to mouth.

"He lets me in every night," she whispered again, as close to his ear as she could manage with the iron between them. "I stay as long as I can. Until I'm afraid I'll be missed."

"Every night?" She nodded, and his face fell. "When do you sleep?"

She laughed a sad, bubbling laugh, and kissed him again. "Of course you would be worried about me, when I'm the one visiting you in the dungeons. Sometimes I sleep a little here, beside you. More than once I know I've deterred them from making your life worse by my presence alone. I can't countermand the King, but I could still make them miserable if I wanted."

He grasped rigidly at the bars, reeling, dizzy with realization, and managed, "You should have let them."

She loosed a bitter breath. "What are you saying?"

"I would rather be whipped and beaten and endure whatever other torture they pleased, with my eyes on you," he whispered fervently, reaching to stroke her face, feather-soft, with a trembling hand, "than have peace without you."

Her face crumpled again, those pretty features creasing with her tears, and they felt after each other through the bars—forehead to forehead, fingertips to fingertips, and hesitantly, fearfully, breathlessly, mouth to mouth.

Unconsciousness, he was beginning to think, was a two-edged sword.


	11. Stitches

_Prompt No.11_  
_Word count: ~1185  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Early Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Needles, sutures/stitches, scars_

**Stitches**

Link moved with such calm precision it was sort of mesmerizing. Every motion was confident and practiced, not unlike it had been when he rescued her from the Yiga a few weeks earlier. The wound stretched red and gaping from his throat to his rib, and he already had his shirt off, the lesion disinfected and dried, and the needle threaded and hanging from his teeth as he deftly knotted the end.

But it wasn't the easiest maneuver, trying to give himself stitches with his nondominant hand to mend a wound he largely couldn't see. Still, it had to be done, and he didn't hesitate, starting at the jagged tip that crossed his rib. He pierced himself with the needle and she grimaced. He hardly reacted at all; it was only on account of their constant traveling together that she even noticed the slightly fuller breath he loosed out his nose, the way his eyes darkened to mask the discomfort stirring within.

Soon he had to go by feel, and the thread went crooked. Zelda scooted forward, hands trembling, and reached to take the needle.

"Let me."

He stopped, looking mortified, the thread hanging awkwardly out of his chest.

He opened his mouth briefly to object, but then snapped it shut. If he didn't already know she was the more stubborn of the two of them he was a fool. And wasn't this exactly the sort of thing she'd been suggesting recently? Something beyond merely tolerating their arrangement? Learning to appreciate one another's strengths, cooperating? A partnership?

She pinched the needle and he relented, his lips tugging down gently. She could tell his frown had less to do with her lack of experience and more to do with the task being beneath her; but she also knew he was conditioned to follow her lead in certain areas, and the precarious, morphing nature of their relationship was definitely one of them.

She settled a little closer, bracing one hand on his bare shoulder as she mentally prepared herself to sew his skin shut. She tried not to focus on the smooth muscle that made up the planes of his chest, so much firmer under her touch than she had imagined—not that she had _imagined_, certainly, but it was… distracting…

She cleared her throat and got started.

She brought the needle to bear on the edge of the wound, brow furrowed with concentration. She had never, ever done something this grisly in her life. But she was a scientist—which, in addition to making her adept at trying new things, also made her acutely aware of the fact that this cave they had happened upon was hardly a sterile environment—and she had fashioned the very tunic he had cast off earlier herself, so she was at least capable of mending in a straight line.

She took a shaky breath, the needle trembling in her hand, and insisted, "Tell me if I hurt you."

"You'll do fine," he murmured, lips moving gently towards one of those small, crooked half-smiles he had taken to wearing since she decided not to hate him, the ones that made her shoulders ease and her face warm and that she constantly caught herself fixating on because it was still so new and rare and absolutely fascinating to see any emotion on his face at all—

She dipped the needle into his flesh and started threading, the task before her suddenly a welcome distraction. He relaxed after the first few strokes, closing his eyes when she found a rhythm. She was halfway done when it occurred to her she might not be doing it right, that it might leave a scar, and worried for a split second that he might not like it—but one glance at the rest of him allayed those fears. He was riddled with scars already. He probably wouldn't mind one more.

She finished the suture, running her fingertips over her handiwork to ensure it was relatively even. She could already picture what it would look like, if it didn't set right, amidst the rest of the scars, all raised and sunken and pale, like puzzle pieces all over him.

One cut like a crescent moon over his left breast. Another streaked brilliantly down the inside of his arm. He had a mark straight across the side of his neck, like someone had tried to take his head off. There were jagged, milky tears over his ribs, where it looked as though an animal or something worse had sunk hooked teeth into him and ripped as much loose as it could.

She realized she had been staring for a while, and the bemused look he was giving her when she met his eyes suggested he had noticed.

He asked, quietly, "What is it?"

"I was thinking it might leave a scar," she sidestepped deftly, and he nodded, wearing that muted half-smile again.

"I have a lot of those."

She tilted her head at him, letting her eyes wander briefly down the crisscrossing marks and lines etched over his torso. "How did you get them?"

He shrugged, and then his mouth twisted gently when he saw she wouldn't be deterred. "Which one?"

She gestured along her neck, where the thin, perfectly straight line cut like a falling star. "What about there?"

"Grazed by an arrow," he remembered, and then smirked wryly. "That was clumsy of me."

"What about on your arm?" she asked. "That line on the inside."

He turned it over to look. It started clear above his elbow and ended near his wrist.

"Climbing. I lost my grip and scraped along a jagged edge looking for a hold."

"Climbing where?"

"The Dueling Peaks."

She puffed a breathless, incredulous laugh. "Of course. The Dueling Peaks. Did you just cast your gaze to the horizon one day, pick the most ridiculous looking cliff in the distance, and go tearing after it?"

He tipped his head back against the wall of the cave and smirked. "Yep."

She raised an unimpressed eyebrow and moved on, gesturing again. "That one?"

"Training accident."

"Here?"

"Taming a wild horse."

"What about this one?" she asked, absently tracing the angry marked that curved around his shoulder and tapered into his bicep.

When he didn't answer right away she froze, hyperaware of her fingertips lingering on the scar but too startled at her own impudence to pull away. But when she went to meet his gaze, wide-eyed, the half-smile was gone.

All he said was, "Combat."

Her brow furrowed. She glanced at the angry curve again, the way it raised and puckered less stark than most of the others. It was fresher. She swallowed, tracing the crescent on his breast, still pink with new tissue.

"This one?"

"Combat."

Then she ran her fingers again over the sutures she had just knotted, meeting his gaze. "This one?"

His eyes were like ice. "Combat."

And the scars looked different to her then.

Because suddenly she could clearly see the difference between the ones he had gotten from his life before, and the ones he had gotten for her.


	12. Don't Move

_Prompt No.12_  
_Word count: ~650  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: T  
Themes: Drowning, needles, disorientation, near-death experiences_

**"Don't Move"**

He remembered the blinding pulse of holy light, and the darkness following close on its heels, and the look on her face when she gathered him into her arms. He remembered the hopeless, broken promise she had made. He remembered, vaguely, the dark encroaching around them both as his consciousness trickled away.

Then he felt his lungs pushed open, forcibly inflated, and the haggard breath he drew was so painful his spine arched off the stone slab at his back. Everything glowed, prismed in soft blue haloes of light, and water lapped at his body. He flailed, reaching blindly for an anchor, and Zelda appeared above him, tears streaming down her face.

"Don't move," she urged him, taking his face in her hands, and soothingly brushed his bangs away. "You're going to be all right. The Shrine is—"

His lungs were forced open again, dragging a harsh breath of cool, moist air and pulling wounds apart, and he groaned, writhing.

"You'll be all right," she wept, her eyes not leaving his even as voices murmured behind her, and she nodded once. "You won't remember this," she promised. "Just don't move."

The water sloshed as the pool flooded deeper, rising over his limbs, submerging his ears and blotting out the sounds and the voices of that strange cavern. Only leaving her.

He couldn't hear her anymore. But he could read the words on her lips, mouthed like a prayer, as she held his face. _Don't move_.

The liquid rose higher, covering his ribs, and he tilted his head back desperately, trying to keep his mouth clear. He choked out her name as the water lapped over his lips. And then he clenched his teeth, sputtering, floundering, as his lungs were forced open again.

He thrashed, limbs flailing and water spraying in all directions as he fought to breach the surface, as every instinct in his body screamed that he was seconds from drowning. His heart jack-knifed in his chest and his head spun. The water sloshed everywhere, and Zelda was so hard to see through the tumult on the surface.

Then the burn was too much, and he had to obey.

He gasped a lungful of water, which he quickly realized wasn't water at all. It ached like inhaling water would, but when he exhaled and dragged of it again against his will, taking the odd stretch of it into his chest, he stopped fighting it.

Her hands were still on his face, coaxing him through the process, gently brushing at his rippling hair, at his jaw. Soothing him while he drowned.

Soon the water was still enough that he could make her out through the surface, glowing in the radiant blue emanating from his pool. Her fingertips stroked along his forehead as his body twitched reflexively again with another drag of liquid into his lungs.

_Don't move_, she was whispering again, those pristine, otherworldly green eyes of hers harnessing his, lulling him into senseless obedience.

He let his whole body go limp, lolling when the Shrine forced his lungs open again, letting his eyes roll back as the machine took its readings and began its work, holding perfectly still when her hands finally pulled away and something heavy and unyielding forced his head down to the slab. The cavern went dark as he was sealed inside, and he whimpered quietly at the loss of her touch—at the loss of the one thing that had made dying a second time remotely bearable.

Then, burning like a streak of white light, he felt the pain of a dozen searing needles perforating his spine like hot knives into butter, his body twitching again on its skewers as his lungs took another involuntary drag of liquid.

_You won't remember any of this._

His eyes closed softly as the numbing agents did their work, dragging him under and keeping him there for 100 years.

_Just don't move._


	13. Adrenaline

_Prompt No.13_  
_Word count: ~470  
__Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Panic attacks, fear_

**Adrenaline**

His blood pounded through his jugular. His pupils were blown. Every muscle across his back and shoulders was coiled to strike. He knew that near-painful spike of fear better than most. It had been his constant companion for longer than he cared to admit.

It struck when he needed it most, sending his pulse into a blind fury and setting his nerves alight. It surged through his veins when he faced an enemy. It ricocheted in his skull when, scaling a cliff face or a mountainside, his energy began to wane. It thrilled up his spine when he took the first steps into unknown territory, keeping him alert. It kept him alive.

What he didn't understand was why it was striking him _now_, when everything was quiet and he had his arm wrapped around the woman he loved and he finally had a moment's peace.

He tremored as the fear rushed its course all through him, making his fingers tingle and his lips go numb, grasping at the ground for an anchor. There was nothing he could hold on to that would ground him in the solitude and the quiet, nothing that would make his head stop spinning or the world less crushing.

He released a shaky breath and tried not to make a sound, tipping his head back and swallowing down bile rising in his throat. When he closed his eyes the sky was red, and the malice was burning, and she was gone.

His throat swelled. His chest tightened until he thought it would burst and his stomach roiled. Hyrule was sprawling and infected again, and he was alone, and empty, and anonymous. He bit down on his teeth and tried not to scream.

She laid cool fingertips gently on his hollow of his throat, reading his galloping pulse—how could she not be awake, when he was trembling so violently around her?—and didn't lift her head from his shoulder. She wrapped an arm around his middle and waited. And when he was still for too long, trying to stifle the tremors, she reminded him, "Breathe."

The breath he sucked and loosed, longer and deeper, made him melt a little into her grip. He focused on it, on the warmth, the softness, the security, and tried so hard not to imagine it being ripped away. Because _everything_ had been ripped away once. It meant everything could be ripped away again.

His eyes unfocused as the adrenaline swallowed him whole, pitching him into darkness and reducing his breathing to shallow gasps.

But there were no enemies to outrun, no dangers to shield her from.

Fear was the monster the Sword that Seals the Darkness could never slay, and there was little to be done but let it feed on him until it was satisfied.


	14. Tear-stained

_Prompt No.14_  
_Word count: ~810  
__Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Torture, mind probes  
_

**Tear-stained**

They dragged Zelda through the the narrow crevices of the canyon, lit by a spattering of torches that made the passageways taste of smoke and sand, wrists bound and heart sputtering. When the trail led her straight into the Karusa Valley, she knew it was foolhardy to go in after him. But he had already been missing _twelve days_, and the thought of leaving him in that place for longer…

Her capture had been swift. But when she demanded to see him, they surprised her by agreeing.

They finally arrived at the small, dark cell where he was being held, and forced her inside. He was on his knees, his eyes empty and blown, and a Yiga stood at his back, hand outstretched, palm open, toward the back of his skull. His face was expressionless, streaked with dust and tears. He exhaled, trembling violently, and the fire in her gut dampened.

Yiga arts were more elegant than most people knew. Even without a master to serve they were dangerous, and motivated beyond reason. She wasn't stupid enough to attempt to talk them out of it.

She whispered, "What are you doing to him?"

"Combing his memories," the captor at her shoulder murmured, his voice shrouded by his mask. "Sifting through time. Looking for answers."

The Yiga torturing him coiled his hand gently, little more than a turn of his fingertips, and Link lurched, more tears spilling out of his eyes with a breathless gasp.

Her face twisted into a bitter frown. "You're tearing his mind apart."

He tilted his head, conceding, and she wrenched free of his grip. She went to her knees, trying to reach him, whispering his name desperately. But he didn't answer. He didn't seem to know she was there at all.

"He can't hear you," the Yiga at his back murmured, sounding distant himself. "He sees what I tell him to see. He hears what I tell him to hear. He lives in the past, in the pieces of it that I force him to show me."

"Link," she said again, cupping his face with her bound hands, and he hissed softly, overstimulated.

She rocked back on her ankles, at a loss. His whole body shook with every breath, every gasp, the cell filling with the shuddering sound of his panting. More tears rolled down his face, leaving fresh, gaunt stains, and the fingers behind his head spread again, silently urging out more.

"What is he seeing?" she whispered, reaching again to brush at his jaw, and dispairing when her touch made his body lurch again.

"The Wilds. Loneliness. A soldier with no commander, no army. A woman with a smile like the sun."

"Make it stop," she begged, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. "Let me talk to him."

"As you wish."

He withdrew his hand with a flourish, and Link finally made a sound, a broken cry falling out of him as the mindprobe withdrew, and pressed his fists into his forehead. She waited, breathless, while he came out of it. And then his hands lowered, and he saw her, and his eyes went wide.

"Zelda." She nodded once, not quite able to speak, and he reached out with a trembling hand to touch her mouth. "This isn't real."

"I'm real," she promised, lips quivering. "I'm here."

But his expression turned to flint.

"No," he growled, gnashing his teeth, and grabbed her by the shoulders—and as he did, sobbed, feeling the reality of her between his hands, and more tears burned hot, pale trails down his face. "You can't be here. You can't be real. Because you would never be that—that _stupid_—"

His face crumpled and he bowed his head, holding her shoulders like a lifeline.

"I'm sorry," she whispered brokenly, watching him fall to pieces and knowing there was nothing she could do to comfort him. "I'm so sorry, Link."

Then the Yiga stroked the back of his jaw, running lithe fingertips up behind his ear, and Link reflexively lurched away, catching a cry in his throat, and pinched his eyes shut. His hand ran along the side of his skull, threading in his hair and pulling his head back to rest against his thigh, stroking him gently as though he were soothing an animal.

"Don't touch her mind," Link whispered, desperate, shattered, his eyes never leaving hers. "Please. Just leave her alone."

"We can arrange that," the Yiga promised softly, encouragingly. "If you cooperate."

His closed his eyes, loosing a shuddering, defeated sigh, and leaned further into his leg.

"There," he soothed. "That's not so bad, is it?"

His captor lifted his hand from his hair and spread his fingers, and Zelda watched helplessly as Link dragged an awful breath, his eyes blowing out and turning vacant, and the Yiga slowly, deftly, tore his mind open.


	15. Scars

_Prompt No.15_  
_Word count: ~2030  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No.11 — Stitches"  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Trauma, stitches, scars, memory loss, healing_

**Scars**

At first, when she dreamed of freedom, she would dream of a rebuilt kingdom, and of prosperity, and of peace that would last for generations. But when freedom finally came, she found herself reveling in much simpler pleasures. Fresh air. Cool rain. Warm sunshine. The gentle pull on her hair when the wind blew. The smell of grass. The sweet taste of springwater. She spent the first few days up well before dawn, basking in the unfathomable beauty of the sunrise. But between long days of travel and turbulent, breathless nights, her companion began to insist she prioritize sleeping.

He promised sunrises would still be there after she had recovered.

It had been nearly two weeks since the Princess and the Hero left the skeleton of Hyrule Castle behind them, looming over their battlefield like a hollow tombstone. They found themselves wandering back to his modest home in Hateno relatively quickly—not that they were short on invitations to stay elsewhere, of course, but after everything they had both been through they were drawn to the peace and quiet and the promise of a little solitude.

She didn't bother trying to sleep alone in the loft. She already knew from experience, having woken up screaming in Impa's house that first night in Kakariko, that the nightmares were worse when he wasn't beside her, and that once they took hold she took solace in no one else. And as for him, he rested much easier with his arm protectively wrapped around the person he had fought so hard to save.

A clatter sounded across the house, where Link was partway through fixing them an early supper, and she started. She set down her mug of tea, turning away from the fire and getting up on her knees.

There was a beat of silence, his hands clasped out of sight, before he finally muttered, "That was careless."

She stepped out of the blankets that had pooled around her legs, joining him as he turned around and coaxing one hand out from under the other. His palm was sliced clean open, the red starting to run down his wrist, and she clucked her tongue at him.

"It looks deep."

"It's not bad."

She passed him a knowing look, turning to fetch a basin. "You always say that."

She sent him to sit at the fireplace, filled the bowl with hot water from the kettle, and then opened the chest she had arranged with such great care in the corner. She had hoped its prominent placement would suggest it was used often—it was a gift from Prima, the girl who ran the inn, so she could fashion some of her own clothes—but the truth was she rarely opened it. She was quite content at this stage to simply throw one of Link's extra tunics over her head with some of the leggings he had bought her in town. Worrying about fabric colors and dress patterns still felt all so… frivolous.

She tossed a cloth into the basin and found a needle and some thread, and settled back in her pile of blankets, wringing the cloth and pressing it into his palm. He studied her tools obliquely, watching her moisten the ends of the thread between her lips and twist them into a knot.

"I don't think this is what Prima had in mind."

"Yes, well. I won't tell if you won't." She dabbed at the wound with the cloth, inspecting the damage as she cleaned the edges, and frowned. "What were you doing?"

"Chopping vegetables."

Her brow furrowed. "With _what_?"

He paused; then, "A Demon Carver."

She puffed a breathless, incredulous laugh.

"It's good to know some things never change," she scoffed, and then dropped the cloth in the bowl and brought the needle to bear on his injury. "Ready?"

She glanced up at him when he didn't answer. He was watching her with the most peculiar, hesitant expression, one she hadn't seen in so long, and it whisked her breath away gently as a summer breeze.

"I can manage."

"It's no bother," she shrugged, smiling faintly. "It isn't as though I haven't done this for you before."

"Oh," he said, flatly, and her heart stopped.

And just like that, the air in the room was sweltering and too thick, and she felt like an absolute fool for saying it as though he should have known. Her lips parted, so softly, to try to mend her clumsiness, but then clapped shut. Not all cuts were so easily mended.

Her needle still hovered awkwardly beside the wound. Finally, she prompted again, "May I?"

He nodded, and she dove headlong into her work, burying herself in the task so she didn't have to look him in the eye. He murmured, when she was nearly done, "So fast."

"You've given me plenty of practice," she smiled plastically, knotting the end of the thread, and when she was satisfied turned to put her things away. "I wasn't very good at it at first. I know for a fact I've left more than one scar on you."

He huffed a breath of dry humor. "I have a lot of those."

She clutched the basin to her ribs, her heart squeezing at a memory. When she looked at him he was wearing the same, plastic smile she had worn not a minute ago.

"I can't remember where I got half of them."

Something inside her ached, suddenly, like an old wound. She put the bowl aside, moving on muscle memory, drifting to touch him, to comfort him, as she had so many times before—but that was in another era, she remembered numbly, and reeled herself in. The way she wanted to touch him now… they weren't there yet.

"Like this one," he murmured, absently feeling the mark on his wrist. "It runs all the way up my arm. Can't remember how I got it for the life of me."

"Rock climbing," she answered automatically. "You lost your grip on the Dueling Peaks. Goddesses only know what possessed you to go up there in the first place."

When she met his eyes again, they were transfixed. _Spellbound_.

"Do you… know the story behind any of the others?"

"This one," she whispered, hardly able to find her voice, softly touching the base of his throat where the scar peeked out from his neckline, and swallowed. "I'd never stitched anyone before."

There was another hushed, stifling moment, his eyes boring so deeply into hers it was beginning to burn. Then he reached over his shoulders and slowly peeled his tunic over his head, revealing the pale jigsaw pieces scattered beneath.

Before she could think better of it she had drifted involuntarily forward, brow creased, tracing the jagged lines etched down his body, and loosed a shuddering sigh. "So many new ones…"

"I know it must seem strange—" he breathed, trembling whenever her fingertips stroked a new mark, but she shook her head. She understood. The scars were evidence of what he had lost. Pieces of missing memory he could see with his own eyes, littered all over his body and serving as a constant reminder.

She whispered, "It's not strange."

He bowed his head, staring down at the webwork of stories scarred all over him, and swallowed. He looked almost _ashamed_—not of the scars, but of the fact that he couldn't remember getting them. She hadn't seen him looking so vulnerable since before their reunion. It struck her, like a dull spear in her heart, how intimate it all was.

"You were grazed by an arrow here," she told him, his eyes flickering involuntarily to hers as she ran cool fingertips down the shooting star on his neck. "It was before you were my knight, so I don't know the whole story. But knowing you it was probably something ridiculous."

He flashed her a fleeting, wry half-smile, so similar to the one he used to wear when they were first becoming acquainted, and it made her heart skip. His voice was gravel. "What else?"

"You said you got this one taming wild horses," she said, touching a mark raised over his ribs. The way he was looking at her was making the fireplace feel too warm. "I've never seen you thrown for as long as I've known you. You must have been young…"

And then, slowly, deliberately, he took her other wrist, drawing her hand silently to his mouth as he listened, and pressed a kiss to her palm.

She froze, heart full to bursting as he pressed deeper into her hand, closing his eyes under her fingertips; he murmured into her skin, "Keep going."

She reached for the mark cutting across his chest shakily, the pale scar warm and magnetic beneath her hand. "That was a training accident."

He murmured more encouragement, breathing deep, and her insides reduced to jelly.

She traced scars down his arms, up his torso, across his chest, remembering wounds and choked apologies and a selflessness she could never hope to deserve. Her hand came to rest on the milky gash blown open across his middle, where it looked like something had torn right through him, and the unwelcome heat of before enshrouded her again like a blanket.

But before she could dwell his eyes were drawing her out of it, vibrant as nightshade. He kissed her fingertips before pressing them to his throat, giving her both hands to remember with. She was paralyzed again, hyperaware of her breath, of his pulse beating a steady rhythm through his jugular. He whispered, "Don't stop."

And suddenly she was a slave to that voice, wracking her brain for the smallest details as she recounted every story, remembered every scar, and he would always reward her, tracing her ankle with deliberate slowness, or pressing another kiss to the inside of her wrist, or, as he grew more bold, gently nipping the underside of her chin, or the needy place where her jaw met her ear—and every time she would lose her breath and lean into him, aching to be closer, he would urge her, _More_.

He was insatiable, and so was she, and between the two of them the cycle might never have stopped if not for her running out of scars she recognized.

She swallowed, watery-eyed, breathless, and whispered, touching it, "That just leaves this one."

"The Calamity," he murmured, eyes going distant as he dipped into foggy memory, and she nodded. "Robbie told me some of it."

She could see the Guardian beam in her mind's eye, a bolt of lightning sheathed in blue, tearing through fields and leaving fire in its wake; tearing through him, and leaving blood. That was one story she wasn't eager to relive. He seemed to know without having to be told.

"I…" he began, eyes receding, but then thought better of whatever he meant to say. "Thank you."

She nodded, shuddering, and wiped a stray tear as it fluttered out of her eye with her wrist. Her lips twisted, trembling, and she spat out bitterly, the words little more than a harsh whisper, "I'm so sorry, Link."

He blinked, the spell that had fallen over him so long ago suddenly broken. "What for?"

"If you hadn't been named my knight, your life could've been—I don't know, something else, something _peaceful_. If it wasn't for me, you would still have your memories—"

"Zelda," he frowned, unamused. "If it wasn't for you, I would be _dead_."

She turned to hide behind a curtain of hair, holding her arms. The warmth and heat of earlier evaporated, doused by a healthy dose of reality. She wasn't about to be so easily consoled. But then he sighed at her and pulled her into his arms, and she was powerless to resist.

"Do you honestly think, if I had to live it over, that I wouldn't do it all again?" he murmured, pressing his face into her hair. "You have just as many scars as I do, Zelda. Yours just aren't visible from the outside."

She melted into his embrace, breathless, trembling, frightened, and wondered, absently, what a scar from a century of imprisonment with the Calamity might look like.


	16. Pinned Down

_Prompt No.16  
Word count: ~1590  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Early Zelink if you want to see it that way  
Rating: K  
Themes: Crush injuries, broken bones_

**Pinned Down**

Being the Princess's protector was turning out to be a harder job than Link had imagined. He quickly discovered that she was adventurous by nature, which, while that was an admirable trait, did see her in precarious situations far more often than a princess ought to be. Not to mention that her family had enemies who were intent on causing her harm—powerful enemies, trained to use stealth and disguises to achieve their aim. But the near constant sense of impending danger wasn't really the crux of the problem.

It was the way she had made it perfectly clear, on a number of occasions, that she didn't need or want a bodyguard, least of all him, hovering over her shoulder; hounding her steps; getting in her way; _breathing her air_.

And so when she had snapped at him, as they descended into the excavation tunnel leading to the Shrine of Resurrection, that there was nothing that could possibly harm her down here, he tried to respect her need for a little space and wait near the mouth of the cave. But truth be told it wasn't easy.

Despite her callous treatment of him, he had grown to admire her.

She was self-sacrificing, and dauntless in the face of failure, and she always put the welfare of others before her own. She was clever, and insatiably curious, and responsible to a fault. And as for the rest… he knew why she hated him, and he found it hard to resent her for it.

It made the thought of anything happening to her on his watch hard to stomach.

And just as he had begun to relax—there were a half dozen Sheikah in there with her, after all, and he was guarding the entrance personally, making the tunnel seem relatively safe—a tremor in the earth set every nerve in his body alight.

He was down the throat of the cave in the span of a heartbeat, but none of the scientists seemed particularly concerned; one of the Sheikah looked up from her work long enough to pass him a small, amused smile. Zelda was still facedown in the Shrine console. He thought he heard her sigh.

"We've just powered up the Guidance Stone," the Sheikah explained, taking his sudden presence as a sign he was concerned. "The tremors are normal."

"Secondary systems coming online," another researcher announced, expression unflinching as another shockwave gently rattled the cave, and the strange mechanism in the center of the cavern began to glow with a hazy blue light.

Then, all at once, the world seemed to fracture beneath them.

The tremors spiked so suddenly that they were all thrown off their feet. The Sheikah scrambled to evacuate, shouting to leave the research materials behind as the ground lurched again.

But, perhaps inevitably, there was one who hesitated to obey.

The Princess grabbed the Sheikah Slate from where one of the scientists had left it, and Link's blood pounded hot and furious as the ceiling cracked open over her escape route. He moved on instinct, on pure adrenaline, to push her out of the way. In the next, breathless instant, the tunnel collapsed on top of them, wrenching the two halves of his body nauseatingly in opposite directions as he was caught in the cave-in and smothering the light.

For a long time he saw red. Slowly, pulsing in time with the pounding in his head, the blood and the fire swimming in his eyes ebbed into darkness, and the soft, blue glow of the machine lit the room as the dust and rock settled. It was eerily silent except for the undulating thrum of the Guidance Stone. He craned his head, relieved to find the Princess clear of the debris.

He swallowed. That was good.

His situation, on the other hand, was less than ideal.

He couldn't move. A slab had pinned him to the ground, and the amount of rubble piled on top of it from the surge of the cave-in made his odds of lifting it himself meager at best. He couldn't feel much at the moment, which he optimistically attributed to shock; no sense worrying about paralysis or amputations when there were more pressing concerns, like making it out alive. Then he made the mistake of trying to breathe.

His spine arched and his cry caught in his throat as his body screamed in protest, more than one broken rib pulling unnaturally as his lungs inflated. He held still for a long time, and then carefully, haltingly, exhaled.

No problem. Breathing was sort of optional.

Then her face, smudged, drawn, haloed in misty blue light, drifted into his vision, her touch alighting gently on his shoulder. She was remarkably calm, all things considered. He should have expected as much. It almost made him smile. Almost.

"Are you in much pain?" she asked, quietly, careful not to jostle him as she edge closer, assessing the damage.

"I've been better," he admitted hoarsely. "Help me try to lift this."

She hesitated.

"Is that really a good idea?"

"Probably not."

She sighed, nodding, and moved to get better leverage. "Say when."

He steeled his nerves.

"Now."

The cavern filled with the breathless silence of them straining against the rock. She was stronger than she looked, and between the two of them they managed to move it more than he had expected. But it just wasn't enough clearance. It came crashing down on him again when they released it, and he screamed between his teeth.

"Ok," he rasped, gulping air as the burst of light behind his eyes began to fade, "let's not try that again."

She crawled beside him, all the blood drained from her face, and murmured, voice quivering, "What can I do?"

"Not much," he whispered. "Are you hurt?"

She scoffed. "Not a scratch on me."

"Not true," he murmured, reaching numbly to point out the thick, red line running up her arm.

"One scratch," she amended, too quietly, and frowned at the pile of rubble. "I could try to dig you out, but I don't think…"

"No," he agreed. "We're better off waiting for the others."

She nodded, finally beginning to look shaken. The silence turned thick as she studied him, the way his body was twisted and crushed beneath a rock the size of the castle cornerstones. Her eyes watered.

She turned with a quivering sigh, plucking the Sheikah Slate off the ground.

"You know, when the dust settled, the first thing I did was look for this?" she admitted, frowning at it. The light flickered on when she held it, splashing her face in soft, blooming cyan colors. "I didn't even think to check to see if you were hurt. It never occurred to me that you might not have…" She set the Slate down with a clatter, blinking away more tears. "_Gods_."

He took a breath to say something, wishing he was better with words; the excruciating stretch of his ribs cut his attempt short, and he bit down hard on nothing, throat bobbing as he swallowed pain. She hovered attentively, eyebrows pinched as she watched him struggle.

"You're going to be all right," she promised, touching his face soothingly, feather-soft. "The temple isn't far. They'll be back with help soon."

"Oh, I know," he managed, his voice gravel. "I was going to try to comfort you."

She laughed breathlessly, a few stray tears finally spilling down her cheeks. "Of course you were."

Another rough cry caught in his throat when he made to respond, fresh agony tearing from his ribcage down to his suddenly responsive legs and feet, finally beginning to tingle with telltale throbbing of crushed muscle and ruptured bone.

"I know I'm not normally one for much conversation anyway," he gritted out, "but given the circumstances—"

"Don't speak," she mollified him softly, and then murmured, smirking gently, "I don't think you've ever said this many words to me in one sitting."

His lip quirked up. "I don't think you've ever said this many words to me without scowling."

She nodded gracefully, her smile watery. "I hated you because you made fulfilling your destiny look easy."

"I know."

"Even this," she breathed. "You didn't hesitate. You didn't stop to think about yourself."

"The cave was about to collapse on you," he murmured. "No time to think."

"You know what the worst part is?" she sniffled, watching him writhe as another wave of feeling poured back into his lower half. "I caused this mess, endangered _you_, because I wanted the Slate. But that Slate, this technology, it's all worthless without you. Without the Sword that Seals the Darkness and the man who wields it, the battle would never end. It would just rage forever."

He whispered simply, panting as the pain ebbed, "And I'm worthless without you."

She stared at her hands a long time, and he stared at her. When she finally looked up, her eyes were full of regret, and remorse, and a warm, gentle gratitude he hadn't expected.

"Thank you," she said, "for saving my life."

Something fragile and true, buried deep in him as instinct, stirred reassuringly in his heart. It stirred when she shielded his head with her body as the rescue team finally started breaking through the rubble; it stirred when she was asleep at his bedside as he woke up the next night in the sick room; it stirred as she smiled at him, when he was finally well enough to escort her again.

She had a smile like the sun.


	17. Stay with me

_Prompt No.17  
Word count: ~770  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Early Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Fever_

**"Stay with me"**

Ever since he rescued her from the blades of the Yiga, Link's relationship with the princess had changed.

She smiled at him more. She talked to him while she did her research, and even worked to coax replies out of him during supper. She didn't object when he followed her everywhere, or roll her eyes when he joined her in the stables in the morning. She let him know when she was going out instead of constantly trying to ditch him. She had started using his name.

It was nice. It was the sort of thing that made him second guess his initial reaction when he had seen the blood. It was the sort of thing that let him be talked into going on because it was _just a scratch_. It was the sort of thing that made him listen, after she let him bandage the wound, when she told him to _stop worrying_ about it. It was the sort of thing that made him write it off as just a little overexertion when she was exhausted and dragging by sunset. It was the sort of thing that dulled his good sense.

By the time he realized, feeling after her throat in the middle of the night, that she was burning up with fever, he didn't have a choice but to leave everything behind and rush her back as fast as the wind could carry them.

It had been his own stupid, _selfish _complacence that had gotten them into this mess, and Hylia take him if he couldn't get her out of it.

He urged his horse on again, the froth on its neck and mouth slicking the reins as it pounded across Hyrule Field towards the silhouette of the castle, looming darkly in the sunrise. He held her closer when she felt him clutching at his chest, shivering in the early morning cold.

"Hold on, Zelda," he murmured into her hair. "Stay with me."

By the time they reached the causeway, his horse trembling and huffing with exertion, the princess wasn't looking much better. He carried her through the castle's labyrinth of corridors toward the physician's quarters, causing a ruckus and jarring the staff awake with their untimely arrival, and when the doctors pulled her from his arms to tend to her and ushered him back into the hallway, he felt spent and bereft.

He spent the day pacing outside the door, waiting for news, and when they finally came out near midnight and told him the fever had broken, something burning in him doused, too. And the next morning, when they roused him from where he had nodded off against the corridor wall and told him he could go inside, he felt stronger than he had felt in two days. But one look at her as he latched the door closed behind him, and all the hunger and insomnia came crashing down again, and he didn't feel strong enough to face her.

But she had already spotted him, blinking a tired smile as he crossed the threshold.

"They told me you burst into the castle gates at dawn with me in your arms, ordering everyone around like a madman," she smirked, her eyes sparkling with laughter. "Thank you. I would like to have seen that."

He drew a chair up beside her bed quietly, not quite able to conjure a smile himself, and sat for a moment, hands threading rhythmically, before he met her eyes. "You shouldn't thank me, Princess. If I'd been doing my job you wouldn't have gotten sick in the first place."

She scoffed, waving her bandaged arm dismissively in an impressive show of exactly how little energy she had. "You tried. I wouldn't let you."

"I never let you talk me out of doing the right thing before."

"Well," she sighed, blinking another lazy smile, "you worry about jeopardizing our friendship now. I admit I've been using that to manipulate you recently."

He scowled at her, but when she laughed the disapproval dissolved away.

"I'm glad you're on the mend," he finally told her, earnestly, quietly. "I'll let you rest."

But her hand was on his before he could leave his chair, her eyes glittering with the first bit of fear and discomfort he'd seen since this whole thing started.

"Don't go," she said, so quietly, mustering the saddest, smallest smile for him. "Stay with me."

And the way she looked at him made his lungs deflate and his hands and feet warm. It was nice. It was the sort of thing that dulled his good sense.

So he stayed.


	18. Muffled Scream

_Prompt No.18  
Word count: ~1900  
Universe: Majora's Mask  
Pairings: None (but Zelink let's be real)  
Rating: K  
Themes: Involuntary movement/body control/body enslavement_

**Muffled Scream**

When the Princess of Hyrule, trudging through calf-deep snow up to a secluded cottage in the mountains, found the man she suspected had been the Hero of Time, he was feeding his goats. He didn't acknowledge her, though she supposed he must have heard her coming from half a mile down the slope; heroes were notorious for things like that.

"I'm looking for the White Warrior," she said to his back, setting her jaw when he set the feedbucket down without turning. "Have I found him?"

"Who's asking?"

She swallowed. "An old friend."

He scoffed. "I would hardly call you that, Your Highness."

Nail bit into knuckle where her hands had closed over themselves. Though she had expected him to harbor some bitterness, his callous greeting still stung. But she certainly hadn't come all this way to be put off by the cold shoulder.

"Does Hyrule need saving again?" he asked placidly, finally turning around. His eyes were like ice, cutting through the snow right into unhealed wounds. But she didn't frown.

"Hyrule is doing very well."

"Then what are you doing here?"

For a moment, the mountain and the snow and his hostility swallowed up every sound, blanketing the world in a fragile silence. Then she told him, so much more quietly than she intended, "Looking for you."

He sighed, his breath leaving him in a great, white whorl. She feared they were at an impasse—that he would turn her away. But then his mouth tugged into a frown and he said, turning towards the house, "Come inside."

She followed him, shivering. His cabin was modest, though there were telltale signs that it was his: a Hylian shield over the fireplace; an ocarina on the mantle; a stash of weapons piled in the corner; a book on the desk written in Zoran script.

"White Warrior," he echoed, shaking off his cloak. "Where did you learn that name?"

"Many places," she breathed, pulling off her boots. "That's what they called you in Umrimul, and Fordiskae, and Drehd Sol before that."

"I'd forgotten Drehd Sol," he murmured, and her heart squeezed.

"They haven't forgotten you."

He hummed, dragging a second chair toward the hearth for her. She drifted towards the warmth of the fire, and he lifted the empty kettle off the floor before turning to go out back. She took that as an invitation to make herself at home, moving to explore a little. The ocarina was familiar, small enough to fit in a child's hands. The shield was bludgeoned and worn. A chest peeked out from under his bed, gilded with a gold rim and lock. She pulled it out gently, peeling the lid open to peer inside. It was full of masks.

The lid slammed shut, nearly closing her fingers inside, and her eyes snapped up, startled.

"You would do well to mind our own business," he bit out, kicking the trunk back under the bedframe, and she swallowed, slowly getting up from the floor. He was gone before she could apologize, picking up the kettle from where he'd dropped it in his hurry to keep the masks from prying eyes, and set it over the fire. Then he sighed at her. "You won't make it back down the mountain before the storm hits. You'll have to spend the night."

She sighed, too. Someone in the village had warned her as much, but she had been so eager to finally find him…

"I don't mean to inconvenience you," she whispered, and he fixed her in an icy glare.

"Then what do you mean to do?"

She shook her head, settling in front of the fire and staring tiredly at the hungry flames. "I don't know."

They sat in silence until the kettle shouted, and then he made them both a floral mountain tea. She thanked him quietly, just breathing the steam for a while as her numb fingers gradually came back to life.

"They sing songs about you in Umrimul," she whispered, her mind filling with the reverent, bittersweet lyrics. "They loved you."

"They didn't know me."

She arched an assenting brow. "They said you swept through like a storm."

"I was younger then," he mused. "Still chasing after adventures."

"Then why did you settle here?"

"Why not?"

"You could have come home."

He studied his tea, taking a pensive drink before he answered. "No. Not Hyrule."

She stared, the question burning a hole in her throat until she finally forced it out, barely more than a whisper. "Why?"

He took another drink and tipped his head back, watching her sidelong. "There are some powers not meant for this world."

She scoffed, her own bitterness, her own _yearning_, coloring her voice. "And you consider yourself among them?"

He whispered, "I do now."

She frowned into the silence, turning her attention back to the fire. She wished he would just be plain. She wanted him to come home. But if he wouldn't be coerced—if he wasn't willing, or if he couldn't forgive her—then she didn't want to prolong her suffering by holding on to hope. She had held onto it for so long already.

His voice stirred her out of her reverie.

"You look exactly the way I remember."

She rolled her eyes gently. "I was a child when you saw me last."

He shook his head. "I mean before."

His eyes bored softly into hers, and their sudden familiarity made her heart ache. As then soon as it had come the moment was over, and he receded easily back into his armor.

He asked, "Are you hungry?"

"A little," she admitted, and he left her to fix them both an early supper.

The stew he made was hearty and burned comfortingly in her stomach after the long, cold journey up the mountain. He set out a veritable cloud of pelts for her beside the fire to sleep on. She suspected his failure to offer her his own bed had more to do with the trinkets that lay beneath it than any lack of manners on his part.

She settled down into the pelts in her travel clothes with her back to the hearth, watching him cross the room to his bed with the chamberstick.

"Link," she whispered, and he took too long to turn around, like he wasn't used to hearing his own name. "Why do you keep those masks under your bed?"

He sighed, turning down the sheets and climbing into bed. Finally, the words prying themselves out of him like a confession, he said, "Because they're dangerous."

And then he blew out the candle.

When she stirred in the middle of the night, he was sitting with his back against the hearth, eyes trained on her as she slept.

She sat up with a gasp, startled; it was hard to make out in the firelight, but his face had changed. His hair was too pale, and his skin was ashen, and between the vivid markings on his face, where the crystalline blue of his eyes should have been, his irises and pupils were alabaster white. His lips twitched towards a smile.

"What are you doing up at this hour?" she murmured, wiping at eyes laden with sleep.

"Watching you," he said simply.

She took a rousing breath, moving closer to the embers for warmth. She pursed her lips. "You're wearing a mask."

He puffed a laugh. "Astute of you to notice."

"You said the masks were dangerous."

"So is a sword, if you don't know how to use one."

She glanced at the chest, the gilded edge catching the glow of the fire and casting it back in a muted beam. He followed her gaze and smiled.

"Would you like to see them?" he asked, his voice quiet. Tempting. "I know you're curious."

He got to his feet before she could answer, dragging it back to the hearth and opening the lid wide. They were scattered about inside over a few protective layers of cloth, staring up and sideways soullessly. Then he was behind her, watching them with her from over her shoulder, and his body was unnaturally warm.

"They're mostly harmless," he murmured, so close to her ear, encouraging her to rummage.

Her better judgment told her to leave them alone. The bitter part of her that wanted to understand why he never came home told her to take the answers before the opportunity was gone.

"Do you remember this one, from when we were children?" He reached in and drew up a yellow mask with slanted eyes, adorned with bright ears tipped in black paint. "Keaton spirits will speak to you while you wear it, if you know where to look."

"Keaton spirits can be mischievous," she murmured warily, and she felt his mouth turn up into a smile.

"So can children."

She traced faces, shapes, textures, feathers, scales, wondering at them. He pulled out another mask, flesh-colored, that wrapped around eyelessly and curved up like a quail's feather into a second face.

"A spirit named Kamaro gave me this. He was a master dancer. But he never passed on his teachings. The mask is filled with his regrets. If you wear it, you can perform the dances he once knew."

The inside of the mask faced her hollowly. It was chilling; it was as though, without eyes and without a face, it was staring up at her, full of impatience.

"Would you like to try it?" he asked, surrounding her with his arms as he took the mask in both hands, and she sank back into him as he guided it closer.

She objected quietly, breathless, "I don't know how to dance."

"The mask will help you," he soothed, and whispered into her ear, as the cool edge of the mask touched her face, "I would love to see you dance for me."

The mask sealed to her skin, so tightly she feared she wouldn't be able to breathe. Then she was moving of the mask's accord, shedding her cloak as she nimbly got to her feet. It was as riveting as it was disconcerting: dancing so elegantly, so precisely, as her muscles obeyed each command in absolute perfection. She leapt and spun, arching her back and her neck and her limbs into the exquisite positions the dance demanded. And Link watched her from beside the hearth, the flames dancing in his colorless eyes.

But she couldn't stop. Her hands wouldn't reach for the mask, and her feet wouldn't obey when she tried to rest. She danced, helpless as a marionette as the mask pulled the strings. She danced until her lungs burned, until her feet bled. She wept and screamed and begged to stop, but the sounds were muffled from behind the mask. And Link watched her from beside the hearth, the flames dancing in his colorless eyes.

Finally, she began to overcome it, regaining the slightest control over her fingertips, over her toes. She dragged her hands down to her face, dizzy with overexertion and fear—

And then he was there, gently holding her wrists, pulling her hands away from the edge of the mask and pressing his mouth to her ear, swaying with her, running his hands slowly down her sides as the mask compelled her to dance and she helplessly obeyed.

And as he held her close, Zelda heard Link's muffled, broken screams from the other side of his mask.


	19. Asphyxiation

_Prompt No.19_  
_Word count: ~1510  
Universe: The Wind Waker  
Pairings: Zelink/Tetra x Link  
Themes: Punishment, torture, asphyxiation/suffocation, phantom pain_

**Asphyxiation**

When they were children, they discovered a fallen kingdom sleeping beneath the waves. They restored Sages to lost temples, Sacred Power to an ancient sword, and reunited the fragments of a Divine Relic. She uncovered her true identity, and he sheathed his sword inside the skull of an ancient enemy, and they watched helplessly as the King of that lost kingdom let himself be swallowed by the deluge breaking from above.

The inhabitants of the Great Sea had been none the wiser. Their lives carried on, unchanging and ever monotonous. Sometimes she envied them.

Her boat swayed as she crossed out of the currents surrounding the Mother and Child Isles, drifting listlessly into the massive shadow thrown by the larger island onto the sea. She moored her craft on an outcropping, the Sheikah Stone on her neck pulsing warmly. An unfailing compass, pointing her towards her true north.

She unfurled her grappling hook and set it loose over the isle's outer ring. On the sixth throw, the hook caught. Her heart pounded as she scaled the wall, fearing what she would find on the other side. Fairies were powerful creatures, and vain to a fault. She shuddered to think what one who thought herself insulted was capable of.

She dropped into the crater. The trees and seagrass bending inward from the edges were hued with autumn colors, and the pool at its center glittered with magic. The crystalline Queen of Fairies floated above it, absently stroking her doll, and the Hero of Winds was hunched over at her feet.

Tetra swallowed, approaching cautiously. Just as her boots were about to dip into the edge of the pool she reached a barrier, crystalline as the fairy herself and hued in so many enchanted colors where she touched it.

"Welcome, Princess," the fairy said, the regal cadence of her voice at odds with her youthful appearance. She whispered into her doll's ear, and Link stirred, dragging his bone-weary face up to meet her eyes.

"You know who I am?"

The Queen Fairy laughed, a soft tinkling of little bells. "Yes, Zelda, I know who you are."

She got to her knees at the barrier's edge, pressing her hands to the invisible rim, staring through the kaleidoscope of colors blooming under her fingertips. He reached back slowly, hesitantly, mirroring her touch on the other side. She took a trembling breath. She knew the fairy would exact a price. They always exacted a price.

"You're here to take him from me?"

"Yes," she whispered, watching the faint flicker of fear cross his eyes, because there was no disguising the end of it with pretty words.

"And what would you give me," the Fairy Queen smiled, "for his freedom?"

And that was the trick, wasn't it? What could a mortal possibly offer to such a powerful being? She leaned closer, wishing she could push through; wishing she could press her lips against his neck, taste the salt and wind that was unmistakably _him_, and whisper reassurance in his ear the way the fairy whispered to her figurine.

"What do you want?" she dared ask.

The fairy hummed thoughtfully, and then ripped one of the arms off her fairy doll. Link's head snapped back and then fell forward, an awful gasp tearing out of him as his back curved, favoring the arch of his ribs where just such an extra limb would have attached.

"Nothing," she said simply. "I have what I want right here."

Tetra's heart leapt into her throat, feeling after the barrier frantically, thoughtlessly, as though she might find a way through. She pounded her fists on it, and the colors bloomed and rippled like shockwaves on the surface of a still pond. He looked up, panting, tipping his head against the prism wall, and his eyes, so tired, so familiar, met hers gently, whispering words she didn't need a Sheikah Stone to hear.

_That's just like you. Letting your temper get the better of you._

"Let him go," she whispered miserably. "Please. I'll give you anything."

"What could you possibly offer me?" she scoffed. "Your life? Your firstborn? Your wasted kingdom, sitting at the bottom of the ocean?"

Then she took the doll in both hands and ripped it asunder unevenly down its seam, and Link's body yanked and twisted and lurched horribly as he tried to scream. He ended up on his knees, back arched and head bent back to stare up her, and she held him there with a single, bright thread between her fingers, disappearing where it would have connected to his forehead.

"He doesn't belong to you," the fairy said softly, watching him writhe and shudder where she held him taut. "He belongs to Hyrule. But he doesn't know that. I can see it in his eyes. He dreams of escape. Of you. And I'll keep him here until he understands the truth."

Winds tore suddenly through the prism, circling him violently, and the fairy let him go. He slammed one hand, palm open, against the wall separating them, trying to touch her. Trying to reach for her. His other hand was clawing at his throat as the air sucked out of his mouth, out of his chamber, pulled skyward by the cyclone. His eyes started to roll into his head, and then fluttered shut, and panicked tears finally spilled from her eyes.

"He can't breathe," she cried, casting her gaze hopelessly to the Fairy Queen. "_He can't breathe!_"

Her innocent features finally changed, glistening eyes narrowing and porcelain mouth turning down.

"He's the Hero of Winds," she sneered. "Surely they'll spare him."

"Why?" she wept, watching him gasp for nothing, watching his face turn listless. "Why are you doing this?"

"He abandoned us," she said ardently, like it was the simplest thing in the world and Tetra was a fool for not seeing it herself. "He would have turned his back on us and never returned. Left us here to rot while he served a new Hyrule."

"That wasn't his fault! It was mine!"

The fairy tilted her head, light catching on the glassy film of her hair.

"I took him away," she managed through her tears. "I took him to find the next Hyrule. He would have stayed here, with his family, but I took him because I thought…"

The Fairy's eyes widened horribly, and in one foul snap the wind abated and the prism shattered, rainbow-colored pieces scattering in all directions away from the pool, and Link collapsed, gasping. Tetra drew her cutlass, stepping forward. It was just a reflex, really; she knew a mere pirate's sword was useless against the Queen of the Fairies.

The fairy's head tilted farther, too far, so far her crystalline neck looked like it might snap. "Because you thought…?"

The cutlass trembled in her hand. She could hardly bring herself to admit it out loud. Then her fingers spasmed open and she dropped it, her tiny, pathetic war forgotten, and went to her knees, supporting Link as he struggled onto his arms, and gathered him up, pulling his face into her neck.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, pressing her face into his hair. "I thought it would be better for everyone. I thought we could start over."

"And Valoo, Jabun, the Deku Tree, and I? The Great Spirits? What would become of us?"

She buried her face deeper into him, and he pulled her closer. Because he knew.

"I thought it would be better for _me_," she whispered, and his hold tightened. "I didn't want to be a princess. I wanted to forget. I wanted to be a pirate and answer to no one. Be responsible for no one."

"You can't escape destiny," the Fairy Queen murmured. "One wish cannot undo the war that burns at the heart of Hyrule itself. The King should have known that."

Then the fairy went limp, her head and limbs falling listlessly, and suddenly she was the marionette. Something far more brilliant, all water and petals and wind, terrible and beautiful at once, rose up out of the pool, tugging her strings.

"_Selfish_," the fairy doll hissed, head and limbs swaying and bobbing as she turned, and suddenly Zelda could feel it, every snap and tug of string tingling over her whole body, and she went rigid.

Link felt it. He worked himself upright, still panting, and took her face in his hands.

"Tetra?"

"Don't feed into her delusions," the Fairy Queen scoffed, her voice all water and petals and wind as the doll twirled and twirled. "That's not who she is."

She pinched her eyes shut, dizzy, her pupils blowing out as her vision blurred with the sight from another set of eyes. Then the Queen of the Fairies held her doll close, gently closing her hand over its mouth, and Zelda shook, terrified, tears spilling faster out of her eyes, as her throat closed. Link's grip tightened, trying to pull her out of it, trying to find her eyes.

"_Tetra!_"

"Her name is Zelda," the fairy whispered. "She'll remember that soon enough."


	20. Trembling

_Prompt No.20_  
_Word count: ~1110  
Universe: Twilight Princess  
Pairings: Zelink/Midlink (It's complicated guys ok?)  
Rating: K  
Themes: Addiction, withdrawal symptoms_

**Trembling**

The Hero of Twilight was fiddling with something in his pocket at dinner. The other guests hadn't noticed, of course; he was terribly quiet—something of an enigma, really—and though his responses were always polite his conversation prowess could be classified as awkward at best. So they usually paid him little mind and ended up overlooking all the things he _didn't _say, silently shouting over the cacophony of the dining room so loudly that it made Zelda fidget.

When he excused himself an hour later, more pale than she had seen him in recent memory and his skin alight with a sheen in the candlelight, he didn't make eye contact, and she knew it was bad. She followed not long after, graciously inviting the guests to stay and enjoy while she retired early.

She went to their usual place and the door was locked. She remedied that with a gentle flick of her wrist, ignoring his not-so-subtle request to be left alone, and checked to make sure the hallway was empty before she slipped inside.

His hands were braced on the mantle, his eyes staring, unfocus and unseeing, into the fire. He was trembling all over and panting, his breaths loud and short, like a dog.

"Is there no lock in Hyrule that can keep you out?" he growled, breathless, and she sank demurely into one of the armchairs.

_Just the one on your heart_, she wanted to say. But she refrained. It didn't seem fair to kick him while he was down.

"Do you want a glass of water?"

"As if that will help," he scoffed, and she sighed.

"A chew toy, then?"

He bothered to send her an icy glare. "Funny."

It really wasn't. It was horrible watching him go through this time and again. And it was horrible being his punching bag while he did. But love made you put up with strange things. He trembled again, his eyes rolling back and his throat quivering like he might be sick, and he loosed a gravelly, halting breath when it passed.

"I'm so tired of this," he muttered bitterly, shuddering.

She resisted the urge to go to him, touch his face and his eyes and promise it would pass, knowing he would object. It had happened too fast, once, and she had gotten hurt, and he hadn't let her close until after he gave in since. But these were the moments she lived for: when he was too exhausted to put on his usual front and let his guard down, gradually letting her in. But even then, there was little she could do to ease his suffering. She could destroy the artifact, of course, but that wouldn't help with the symptoms. Addiction was a horrible thing to overcome.

If only Midna were here. He would've listened to her.

A tremor coursed through his whole body and he sank to his knees, bracing one hand on the floor and the other on the hearthstones. His tongue was lolling over his teeth. It wouldn't be long now.

"How long has it been?"

His panting was more resonant, coming from deeper in his throat, like a growl. Base instincts, punching their way to the surface. He choked out, "Three weeks."

She smiled gently. It was the longest he had ever gone. "That's good."

He pinched his eyes shut, holding his breath again. "_Gods_. It feels like I'm—_burning_—"

She gripped the arms of her chair and waited, watching his hands impatiently. Waiting for the inevitable fumble of desperate hands and fabric, the gasping breaths. But he was resilient, and so, so stubborn. He was trembling so hard he couldn't speak anymore.

Sometimes she wanted to make the call for him. Either pull it from his pocket and crush it into dust, or thrust it into his side and steal away those few precious seconds he prolonged his suffering. But he was convinced it was necessary, that it made him stronger. He may have been right, if the last three weeks were any indication.

Finally, trembling all over, dripping sweat, reduced to all-fours and grunting like an animal, he reached into his pocket with a shaking hand and produced the Shadow Crystal, bound in fabric. It tinkled like glass against the hearthstones as he clumsily unraveled it, skittering across the floor as he lurched after it with unsteady hands; and then he got ahold of it and pressed it into his chest, drawing full, gasping breaths as the dark magic flooded his body.

The transformation was quick, deforming his body in a matter of seconds. It wasn't so much the visual that bothered her, the unnatural elongation of his face and body and the way his skin darkened and grew fur in the blink of an eye. It was the chilling series of cracks and pops as his bones realigned themselves, the gentle spurt of blood on the floor as his incisors shunted down. The haunted look in his eyes, later, when he would tell her quietly that_ yes_, _of course it hurt_.

He collapsed on the floor with a whine, spent, and she finally pried herself off the armchair, gathering his massive head into her lap and threading her fingers in his fur. She knew, in some ways, he would rather she not be there. She knew he was ashamed of his weakness. She knew there was someone else he would rather have with him now.

She knew that, for all intents and purposes, that woman was dead. She knew that, someday, he would be ready to move on. And until then, she would be there for him. Maybe, when he would think back on the ones who had been there for him in his most desperate hours, who knew his darkest secrets, who were closest to him when he felt alone in the world, he wouldn't only think of Midna.

Maybe, one day, he would think of her.

"Have I ever told you," she said softly, smiling at him as she felt around his ears, "that you have very soft fur?"

He exhaled a puff of warm air into her skirt, the closest he would come to a bitter laugh in his wolf form. But then he nuzzled closer, reaching up to press his wet nose into her throat, and gave her the tiniest lick with the soft tip of his tongue.

She smiled as he laid his head back in her lap, and leaned down to whisper coyly, "I shall never wash my neck there again."

He sank further into her lap, puffing another wolf-laugh, and she stifled a sigh.

At least the trembling had stopped.


	21. Laced Drink

_Prompt No.21  
Word count: ~680  
Universe: Twilight Princess  
Pairings: None  
Rating: K  
Themes: Truth serum, brainwashing_

**Laced Drink**

They led him down the corridor blindfolded, twisting and turning frequently enough that he had long since lost track of where in the fortress they might be. Finally they heaved him into a chair, bound his wrists to it, and peeled off the blindfold.

The woman sitting across from him smiled softly, white lips quirking up in a way that he read as remarkably genuine.

"Hello," she said.

He let his eyes scan the simple sandstone room. No torture devices. No intimidating array of weapons. Just his interrogator and the pair of guards that had escorted him from his cell.

He didn't find any of that reassuring.

"I just need you to answer a few questions. Can you do that for me?"

His voice was rough from the desert sands. "That depends on what you ask."

"Let's not waste each other's time," she said, nodding to the guards. "We have ways of making you more cooperative. Do try not to make a mess."

An instant later they had wrenched his head back by his hair and were forcing an elixir into his mouth. One tossed the bottle and the other clapped a firm hand over his nose and lips. He sputtered, but managed to expel very little; it oozed purple between her fingers. His chest shuddered and heaved as he fought the urge to breathe. But they were uncommonly patient.

Finally he swallowed, eyes widening a fraction as it slithered down his throat, and gasped haggardly as they let him go.

The elixir was quick. The world felt hazier, _heavier_, and he blinked too wide, trying to get his eyes to focus. His lips tingled. The room felt hot. Her voice sounded a hundred yards away.

"Let's start with something simple, shall we? What's your name?"

He blinked again, processing, trying to shake off the warmth, the fuzziness, crawling over his skin like a creature. He tried to hold it in, tried to bite down on his tongue until it bled. But it felt swollen and numb in his mouth.

"Link."

"Good," she said quietly. "And since we both know who sent you here, let's get that out of the way…?"

"The Queen," he murmured, picturing her face.

"The Queen of…?"

"Hyrule."

"Good," she praised him again. "Are you a spy?"

"Yes."

She hummed ominously. "And why did she send you?"

The room was swimming, all hazy and rosy and thick. He blinked again, listless. "You stopped receiving envoys."

She sighed wistfully, crossing the room, and ran her fingertips over his eyes.

"I do love them when they're like this," she mused, watching him endure it without flinching. "So pliant. Tell me, do you know how the Gerudo ended up in this place?"

"Driven back," he murmured, his lips thrumming against his fingers as she traced his face, "after you declared war over your king."

"And she's worried that we're bitter. That we'll strike again from this wasteland in the wake of your latest conflict and have our revenge on your weakened country."

"Yes."

"And what do you think?" she asked, crouching so they were eye level. "If we sent you home, what would you tell her?"

"Your people are starving," he whispered. "Children are dying in the streets."

"And do you think her precious envoys didn't see that with their own eyes? Do you think took pity on us? Sent aid?" She scoffed quietly, stepping back and folding her arms. "Dose him again."

The guards exchanged cursory glances, but obeyed. She watched him swallow submissively, watched his eyes roll back into his head. And this was where subterfuge became art. This was where torture turned to terror. This was where Hyrule's arrogance would cost them everything.

She tilted his head back, whispering into his tapered Hylian ears, planting seeds, instructions, delusions. He drank them all, devoured every lie and every directive, his pulse slogging and his mind muddled as the potion let him be coerced, made him more malleable.

Brainwashing had been a Gerudo artform for hundreds of years. It was about time the Hylians became reacquainted with it.


	22. Hallucination

_Prompt No.22  
Word count: ~1000  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Concussions, hallucinations_

**Hallucination**

"You can't stop now. You have to keep moving."

"I know."

"I know you're tired. But you have to get up."

"I just need to rest."

"Link," she breathed, pulling his face into her hands and making him look her in the eyes. They were green like the Faron Sea and twice as deep. "You're going to freeze out here. You need to find some shelter. Get a fire going."

He knew she was right. Of course she was right. Hebra was inhospitable at the best of times; the place he had chosen to collapse, and in the middle of a snowstorm no less, was not the most ideal location. He sighed, picking himself woozily off the ground, and saw blood in the snow.

"Just a little farther. There's a cave west of here, remember?"

"I remember," he sighed, dragging his feet through the snowdrift again.

She took his hand. "That's good. It's not much farther now."

That was the problem. He knew exactly how far it was. And it was far.

By the time he reached the cavern he was a trembling mess. Rito gear equipped or not, a blizzard in Hebra was still going to chill you to the bone. His fingers were swollen and numb. He couldn't feel his toes in his boots. His face was burning. He slumped near the entrance, panting, and closed his eyes.

"A fire, Link," she reminded him, jostling his shoulder to rouse him. "We need to get a fire going."

He tipped his head back against the stone and opened his eyes to stare at her. Her brow was pinched in that way it did, all scowling and disapproving to mask the worry beneath. Her lips were rosy from the cold. He wanted to tell her he didn't need a fire. She was warmth enough.

"All right," he whispered, hoarse, and dragged himself off the wall.

He had a bundle of firewood, a tinderbox, and flint in his pack. Setting it up was easy enough, but striking the flint was a clumsy endeavor. After several ineffectual attempts he finally managed to catch a spark. He pressed close to the floor to blow on the flame, and couldn't help thinking how nice it was to be so horizontal.

He sat up when it was healthy, basking in his handiwork for a moment. Then, exhausted, satisfied, he went to close his eyes again.

"You can't sleep yet."

He puffed a frustrated sigh, glaring at her. "Why not?"

She gestured, wincing. "Your head."

He touched that irritating wet place, where his hair was matted and it throbbed. His lips twisted, and then he decided, folding his arm behind his head, "I'll risk it."

"Please, Link."

He sighed again, the sound less frustration and more defeat. He hated how powerless he was when she used that voice—the one where the disapproval ebbed and the care shone through, where her confidence all but wilted and she sounded so helpless. He pulled himself back to the fire again and frowned at her.

"I can't stay up all night," he murmured. "I can't."

She touched his face lightly, mustering a half-smile. "I'll help you."

And there it was, that extra push, that gentle touch that seemed to override everything else, and he leaned into it, out of arguments.

"Fine," he muttered, turning his mouth into her palm and inhaling the taste. She let him, which was nice, tangling her fingers hesitantly in his disheveled hair. But when he finally met her eyes again her expression said he had overindulged. He completely ignored it. "What do you want to talk about?"

"Maybe what on earth possessed you to traverse Hebra, ill-equipped, in the middle of a snowstorm."

He rolled his eyes. "This is hardly ill-equipped."

"You brought exactly one bundle of firewood and exactly no change of clothes, and I counted a grand total of six arrows in your quiver."

"And normally that would be fine," he shrugged, and daydreamed what it might be like to run his fingers through that golden hair, slipping over her shoulders and down her back like strands of fine silk. "The blizzard changed things."

She arched a cynical eyebrow. "You've been tracking this storm on the horizon for two days."

"Must have slipped my mind."

She scoffed. "Or maybe you've _lost _your mind."

He pursed his lips, turning obliquely towards the fire.

"Or maybe I knew something bad might happen," he suggested quietly. "Maybe I just wanted to see you."

She sighed. "You could have asked."

He shook his head. "Not the same."

She stared into the fire with him. Her expression was bland, but he knew she was thinking something. She was _always _thinking something.

Finally, she said, "You should bandage that wound."

He grunted a pithy acknowledgement, and she helped him clean the blood. She helped him get through the night. She helped coax a smile out of him as he explained his plans for the next few days. She helped, she helped, she helped.

By dawn the storm had cleared. From his cave he could make out the silhouette of Hyrule Castle to the southeast, enshrouded by the lambent, whorling smog of Ganon. He could feel his head clearing, too, as though the cool wind that had taken the stormclouds away was pulling the haze from his mind as well. She smiled at him.

"The next time you want to see me, please don't go trying to give yourself a concussion," she said, drifting closer. He tilted his head back as she loomed, his face in her hands and her breath fanning over his lips. "You know where I am. Just come find me."

He closed his eyes, reverent, waiting for the soft press of her lips, the gentle taste of apple blossoms and sunlight. The sun broke over the horizon and struck the pristine snow, and a red sparrow sang its lilting morning call.

He opened his eyes when it didn't come. She was already gone.


	23. Bleeding Out

_Prompt No.23  
Word count: ~630  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: None  
Rating: K  
Themes: Blood, hemorrhaging, near-death experiences_

**Bleeding Out**

He knew a Zora girl once, a long time ago, with eyes like seaglass and skin like corals. He couldn't remember her as well as he would have liked, but he could feel her. Where his memories failed him and the stories of others didn't do her justice, the blessing she had poured into him after he had freed her from Vah Ruta told him everything he needed to know.

She was kind. She was fierce in battle. She was gentle and wise. She was proud to serve, and ready to sacrifice. And though he had been told as much a dozen times, he could feel stirring behind his ribs now the reassuring warmth of the love she had harbored for him once. And he knew she would always, always protect him.

Sometimes it was quick—a twist of the neck, or a mortal blow to a vital organ, and then his heart was restarting and his body mending before he could even register exactly what was happening. He would see her out of the corner of his eye, hear her whispering from memory or some immortal plane, and seafoam flame would ebb off his body and he was hauling himself to his feet to fight another day.

This was not one of those times.

He stumbled again, looking down where he was clutching his tunic to his side, so sodden now that it was doing absolutely nothing to stave off the bleeding. The strike missed all the important bits that might have made this less grueling—the heart, or the lungs, or the spine—tearing through flesh and muscle and leaving the most vital parts of him intact, prolonging this strange ritual he's become so accustomed to.

He took another leaden step forward and his vision swam, and when his legs gave out he was struck by the odd disconnect between his mind and his body, the juxtaposition of the confidence that he will be healed with the visceral terror of feeling his life slipping away. _Again_.

Mipha's Grace was a curse, in a way, as much as it was a blessing. He took risks. He was overconfident. Sometimes, when he was desperate, he launched himself straight into mortal danger, subjecting himself to torture of death because he knew he had the safety net of her protection.

But when the power was spent he felt weak. Once the glow faded he second guessed himself, feared things he hadn't feared, and until he could feel its hot pulse between his lungs again sometimes he was afraid to press on.

But reliance on borrowed power would never make him the warrior he had to be.

He collapsed in the grass, gasping short, searing breaths as his body soldiered on. His blood spilled over Hyrule as it had so many times, painting the fields red. Then the world blackened in that sickening way it did, and his heart stammered sharp and terrifying in his chest, and he took that familiar breath to scream where there was no breath left, and despair slipped icy claws around his throat.

And then he felt the ghost of her touch, heard her whisper the promise in his ear that sounded more and more like a threat every time she reminded him.

_"I will always protect you."_

Life shunted back into him, as electrifying and blinding as a lightning strike, and he fisted his hands in the grass, gasping.

His tunic was still a wet mess, but he knew the wound had healed. He could feel his blood coursing through his veins, pounding that steady, accelerated rhythm as his fear and his newfound strength pulsed together.

He laid there for a long time. It wasn't his first time bleeding out. He could only pray it was his last.


	24. Secret Injury

_Prompt No.24  
Word count: ~680  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: None (But, actually, Zelink)  
Rating: K  
Themes: Bruises, broken bones_

**Secret Injury**

After 100 years locked in incorporeal battle with malice incarnate, the Princess was not ashamed to say that all she really wanted was to rest. Her Knight, stalwart and attentive as ever, hardly needed to be told.

He took her away from the Castle's shadow, across the fields, into an alcove of trees and hills where she could sink into anonymity and tangibility and close quarters. He gave her something to drink and a small serving of food—she didn't crave either, but he asked her to try. And then he lit a fire, even though the sun hadn't quite set yet, and told her to get some sleep. She told him she might have forgotten how. Then she closed her eyes and didn't open them again until dawn.

He gave her a tiny breakfast so she could feel accomplished in finishing it. They walked all morning and laid in the grass and napped at midday, and in the heat of the afternoon he said he was going to go down to the river to wash up.

After about five minutes of being along she couldn't stand it anymore.

She started following him down to the bend, split between this horrible, breathless sensation of being isolated, and the prickling awareness that he was expecting her to give him some privacy. She decided she could satisfy both if she got just close enough to be sure where he was without being able to see much else.

She spotted him at the water's edge, his trousers rolled up his calves and his feet dipped in the rush, gingerly trying to peel off his tunic, and her resolve to keep a respectful distance was promptly forgotten. She drifted closer, watching how sluggishly he worked the fabric off his back, over his shoulders. He grimaced as he pulled it off his head, leaning back to examine the damage.

A bruise radiated from his shoulder down through his torso, all blues and purples and red blotches. No doubt a secret injury he had been harboring since his battle with Calamity Ganon. He traced tender places—three broken ribs at least, she mused, as the latent ability to assess his condition at a glance bubbled to the surface.

She frowned. He obviously hadn't wanted her to see. But she wasn't about to turn tail, run, and pretend she _hadn't _seen. So she settled in the grass on the bank instead, letting him carry on however he saw fit.

At least in this he hadn't changed: his mannerisms, his means of compartmentalizing his pain, were all still very familiar. The way he rolled his shoulder when it felt too tight; the way he hissed and panted when he prodded a wound too hard, even after she _told him specifically not to do that_; the way he tipped his head back and his lips would part when he would give in for a moment and just let himself feel it without that expressionless armor dragged over his face.

After a few minutes of tending to his battered front—if that could really be called tending; there was nothing to be done about broken ribs and bruising—he put his head back on the sand and closed his eyes, soaking in the sunshine. He was exhausted. And the princess found that there was something very restful about watching him sleep.

He turned, suddenly, as though he sensed her presence. There was conflict in his eyes as they met hers, a brief tumble of realization and steel and resignation as he laid, his injury completely exposed, on the riverbank. But she wasn't going to reinforce whatever awful reaction he had been trying to avoid. She tilted her head until it touched her shoulder and smiled lopsidedly at him, toying with the blades of grass under her fingers. When he didn't stop staring, she waved, and that dragged a reluctant smirk out of him before he put his head back down and put his face to the sun.

They were both damaged in that fight. And for now, it was easier not talking about it.


	25. Humiliation

_Prompt No.25  
Word count: ~2440  
Universe: Majora's Mask, sequel to "No.18 — Muffled Scream"  
Pairings: None? (Is that just code for Zelink now?)  
Rating: K  
Themes: Addiction, shame, drowning_

**Humiliation**

She remembered his hands ripping the mask off, and the falling sensation before the world went dark. When she woke the next morning, she was alone on the cabin floor. She sat up with a gasp, trying to piece together the night before and how she had ended up back in the warm nest of pelts. The fire was stoked, and her feet were bandaged, and there was some food laid out on the table.

Link was nowhere to be found.

The storm had abated during the night, leaving the house surrounded by pristine swathes of snow. She looked for him out the front door, and out the back. She checked every nook and cranny of the house, and the tiny loft. She darted to the gold chest, wincing as her feet smacked against the floorboards, but it was locked.

Her first instinct was to run. But she couldn't leave him here. Not like this. Not without answers. Finally, she resigned herself to waiting for him, and helped herself to the food he left out.

He didn't come back all morning. She pried the front door open again near noon and sat at the threshold, watching the sun angle a slow arc over the snow. There were tiny, near imperceptible indents among the sparkling perfection she hadn't noticed before, like tracks of some animal missing all of its toes.

She felt she might go mad for lack of something to do, but she was afraid of venturing out and leaving tracks for him to step in, thinking he might try to come back and somehow escape again without her noticing. She tried to busy her mind with other things. She made his bed and piled her pelts on top. She tended the fire. She packed snow from the back door to soothe her feet. She messaged aching muscles. She studied his strange pile of weapons—a sword forged with gold dust and a sword etched with black roses, and halberds and bows and a quiver laced in beautiful silver carvings—treasures from all around the world. She familiarized himself with his cupboard and steeped herself a cup of tea that she barely touched.

There was finally a sound at the door near sunset, and in spite of waiting anxiously for him all day the thought of seeing him suddenly made her heart rate spike. The door swung open, and she held still at the hearth, and after he took in the sight of her for a moment he frowned. Two masks hung off his belt: the white face from the night before, and a tiny, miserable wooden face, with a gaping hole for a snout where a nose and mouth ought to have been.

"I was hoping you would have gone by now," he murmured, and let the door slap closed while he took off his cloak and boots. He hung his hood on a peg at the front and amended, "I should have known better than to hope your good sense would kick in if I just left you alone."

She folded her arms and turned back to the flames. "How could I leave when you've hardly told me anything?"

"What happened last night didn't tell you enough?"

She shuddered at the memory, subconsciously kneading at sore muscles in her arm. She didn't think she could bring herself to dance ever again. She felt him moving around the room behind her like a storm, looming, silent, ominous, and finally managed, quietly, "It left me with more questions than I had when I arrived."

"Is that what it's going to take to get rid of you?" he demanded levelly. "Satisfying your goddess-forsaken curiosity?"

She glared at him, stung. "It might help."

"I could always force you to leave," he challenged, but her stare didn't waver.

"You could. But only if you're willing to hurt me."

She saw the flicker of regret in his eyes, bursting through in a flash brief as a lightning strike, and the reflexive glance down at her feet. Then he turned, his mouth tugging down, and angled two chairs at each other in front of the fireplace and gestured. She sat as demurely as she could, her pulse pounding hot in her throat and her vision starting to swim. He took the other chair, his ice blue eyes cutting through the dim orange light of the room like poe's fire.

He seemed like a poe to her then: ethereal, always hunting, never resting, itching to set the world aflame so it would match his intensity.

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know why you never came home," she said, failing to keep the tremor out of her voice.

"The masks," he murmured, eyes darkening with memory. "They were too dangerous to bring back to Hyrule."

"I always thought…" she began when she finally found her voice, and then stopped, addled. "It wasn't because you hated me?"

He hesitated, his mouth twitching in a movement that mirrored the earlier lightning in his eyes. "No, Zelda. I never hated you."

She swallowed tears. She had carried that fear, that remorse, that guilt with her for years, and he swept it away as easily as autumn winds carried away brittle leaves. It made her chest ache. But there was so much tumbling into the wake of that relief to take its place, an onslaught of questions she didn't know how to answer, despair she didn't know how to quench, and it was making her head spin.

Finally, at a loss for anything else, she asked, "Where did the masks come from?"

"Termina," he remembered softly. "A world on the other side of this one I found when I was a child. Like an illusion, or a dream, only it was real."

"And you've kept them all this time?"

She thought she saw him flinch, but he turned to face the flames, his thumb moving to rest on his mouth, and it was hard to say for certain. He murmured again, "They were dangerous."

"Then _get rid_ of them," she urged him, leaning closer, seeing a thousand solutions flash before her eyes at once. "Bury them in the ground, throw them in the Crater, it doesn't matter!"

"I _can't_."

"Yes, you can."

He wouldn't meet her eyes. Desperate, she reached for the masks hanging from his belt, determined to make him see, but he thrust his hand out to keep her at bay, standing so quickly he knocked his chair over. His hand was trembling and his eyes were alight. She sat back, slowly, studying him.

"Do you do that to keep the masks from hurting me," she asked, "or to keep me from taking them away from you?"

He loosed a bitter breath, scowling at her disapprovingly, and moved to stand over the fire without righting his chair. He muttered, "Both."

The tears she had swallowed down before came bubbling back to the surface and spilled over. He seemed so close, and it hurt to finally grasp that the obstacle between him and Hyrule, between _them_, could have been so easily remedied.

She whispered, the tears streaking silently down her cheeks, "I don't understand."

"I don't expect you to."

"Last night," she whispered, trembling at the memory, "I heard you screaming."

He spared her an unimpressed scowl. "And?"

"_And?_" she echoed, incredulous. "How could I possibly leave you to spend the rest of your life guarding this power by yourself?"

He scoffed quietly. "I never expected anyone to come here to talk me out of this. I should have known you would try."

She stood with a sigh, carefully putting her chair back where it belonged and then righting his. She gripped the back of it, thinking. The wood under her fingers was full of imperfections, wild like the mountain and hand-carved. It was more beautiful than anything the royal house could have had commissioned. It reminded her of him.

"You make it sound like it's a bad thing," she murmured, and when he didn't answer she had the gall to raise her voice. "If you hated me that much—"

"It wasn't _hatred_—!"

He checked, realizing he had matched her volume and then doubled it. She dithered in the rigid silence that followed, then joined him beside the fire, using its warmth to drown out the chill his rare display of temper had sparked in her.

She finally whispered, "Then why are you so angry?"

She heard him sigh. Then he turned, his eyes still fixed on flames or darkness, and braced his arm against the hearthstones, leaning closer, as though someone might overhear.

"If there was _anyone_—" he checked again, trying to taper his intensity, but there was no filtering it out. His voice tremored with it. "I'm not who I used to be, Zelda. I'm a slave to these—these _things_, too afraid to risk bringing them home and not strong enough to destroy them. And the one person I didn't want to see me like this was you."

She shook her head slowly, silently, hopelessly, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks, and turned to stare at the empty cabin. She suddenly couldn't bring herself to face him.

"You gave me the Ocarina," he murmured. "You said the Goddess of Time would protect me. But she trapped me in Termina until I could change its fate. Forced me to relive the same three days until I could find a way out. If it wasn't for the masks, I would have never…" He huffed a sigh, gesturing uselessly. "I should have known that kind of power would have a price."

"What was it," she whispered, turning to meet his eyes over her shoulder, "the price?"

His lips twitched sideways. "Are you staying another night?"

She glanced out the window. The sun had all but disappeared under the horizon. "Am I invited?"

He loosed a breath of dry humor, his mouth splitting into a smile.

"Yes, Zelda," he breathed. "You're invited."

He moved, placing the masks back inside the chest and locking it again. He gathered up the pelts from his bed and dropped them all back in front of the hearth in a massive pile. He reached for her hand, put the key to the chest in her palm, and closed her fist over it.

"Then you'll see what's become of me," he sighed, still smiling bitterly, and lowered himself to the floor, "and my humiliation will be complete."

He stared up at her, his face lit by the flames, and her stomach fluttered. He was so unguarded, so familiar. She sniffled, wiping at her eyes with her wrist, and joined him on the floor. She held out the key.

"You don't have to give me this."

He pushed it gently back into her hand.

"I'll ask you for it," he warned her, lips parting as his mouth tugged halfway out of its smile. "But don't give it to me. I've gone without before. I'll be all right."

Her brow puckered. "Link—"

"Promise me," he said. "I don't want to risk hurting you again."

She nodded, finally, words lodged in her throat, and held the key close to her ribs, and he laid back in the pelts, pacified. He tucked an arm beneath his head and stared into the fire. He looked more peaceful than he ever had since she arrived.

He said, "Tell me about Hyrule."

She settled beside him in the furs and told him everything. There was prosperity. There was peace. The tribes had never been so connected. The economy was flourishing. They hadn't had a bad harvest in recent memory. Even the children who lived in the forests to the south, who some said were not children at all, had been seen smiling from just beyond the treeline, impish eyes and innocent smiles cutting through the placid emerald haze of those magical groves like tiny stars.

She rested her head on his shoulder as it got late, and he put his arm around her back, and then, the horror of the masks and his self exile nearly forgotten, she closed her eyes and nodded off.

When she started awake in the middle of the night, he was shuddering so violently beside her that her adrenaline spiked. She threw fuel haphazardly onto the fire so she could see something, taking his face in her hands. His body jerked and convulsed with every halting sound he made, his spine was arched, and his head was snapped back, exposing his bobbing throat. She brushed his hair back from his brow, meeting his eyes, and the fear there dropped a stone to the pit of her stomach.

Then she realized he wasn't breathing.

She whimpered his name, desperate to find him relief. His teeth clenched tight and his hands clutched at her arms. He was drowning. And he said he had gone without before. He said he would be all right. But he was _drowning_, and he _kept _drowning, and after five grueling minutes she couldn't stand it anymore.

She left him in a dizzy rush and fumbled with the key, turning it furiously in its lock. She grabbed the white mask sitting on top of the others and slid to her knees beside him, gingerly lowering the mask over his face.

His hand grabbed her wrist, eyes wide and watery as he held the mask at bay mere inches from his face. A last ditch effort to hold her to her promise, to protect her from himself. Then, terrified tears spilling from his eyes as they widened with hunger, he dragged her arm close and gasped a full, horrible breath as the mask met his skin.

His transformation was quick, hair shocking white from root to tip and eyes and flesh fading colorless. War paint seeped out of him like blood, thick and shiny as the shell became his face.

He sat up, panting, still holding her by the wrist, and pressed his forehead against hers.

Her breath shuddered out of her, half relief, half dread. Because he was alive, and he was here. But she didn't know who he was when he was like this.

"Princess," he greeted her quietly, breathing deep against her skin. His lips grazed her cheekbone before he pulled away.

Then he tipped her face up with warm fingers beneath her chin, meeting her glassy blue eyes with his colorless ones.

"You're beautiful when you cry," he whispered, watching her tears fall for an unnervingly long time, and then thumbed at her mouth, his lips pulling back into a wolfish grin. "Now, which mask will you wear for me tonight?"


	26. Abandoned

_Prompt No.26  
Word count: ~680  
__Universe: Ocarina of Time  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Abandonment issues_

**Abandoned**

She had hung her tiny head, a peculiar expression coming over her face, and when he had asked her what it was, she had said it was the voice of the gods.

Then she had turned her back on him and moved towards the light.

His throat had already been raw from the smoke and screaming of the battle he had waged in his other body, but Farore take him if he didn't shout himself hoarse trying to call her back to him.

He shuffled through a bustling, oblivious Castle Town and climbed the ivy up the cliff that ran over the castle gate. He snuck his way into the courtyards and met the Princess of Destiny for the first time, again. He told her he was the boy from her dream.

His throat closed up when she specified that the boy in her dream had been followed by a fairy.

He stayed to make sure Ganondorf was arrested and the Princess was safe. Then he left.

He followed his feet south through Hyrule Field, numb, and found himself back in the woods. The Kokiri children swarmed him. They wanted to know what the world outside was like. They wanted to know where the grassy plains ended and where the forests picked up again. They wanted to know where his fairy was.

When he told them Navi had gone, they all abandoned him, too.

He was homeless—not in the sense that he didn't have a roof over his head, but in that no place _felt _like home. He dragged himself all over Hyrule, looking for that sense of belonging. But the problem was he didn't belong to that era at all. And the one person who understood had gone.

He was doubled over in the muck and rain in the field between Lon Lon Ranch and the great drawbridge when he decided he had no choice. He either had to try to find Navi, or leave Hyrule entirely.

In the end, he did both.

He took his horse, still just a filly, and went back to the one place he had been trying to avoid. He told the Princess he was leaving. She didn't try to stop him, but he didn't think he had ever seen her looking so disappointed.

He fell through worlds and time, fighting more battles and inheriting more powers than he ever meant to. He was heralded as Hero everywhere he went, not because they knew him when he arrived, but because he somehow managed to get himself dragged into everything that didn't concern him.

He never found Navi.

Eventually he went back to Hyrule, let Epona retire to the pastures she loved, and found his way back to the Princess who had been waiting for him. She was gentle, and kind, and so patient with him, even when he had become so standoffish, and embittered, and feral. He joined her army for lack of anything else he was good at. She kissed him once, when they were sitting on the bulwark watching his troops train, and he stared at her for a long time afterwards, wondering what on earth she had done that for. A few years later he married her.

But she knew that he never quite shook off that lingering scar from the aftermath of that future, where he had lost so much and sacrificed the rest, and then was sent back to a beginning he could never rejoin. Sometimes a light would flicker too quickly in the corner of his eye as the wind would rustle a chime, and she would see that haunted look she could never purge shadow his face again, and spend the rest of the evening pretending it wasn't there. Sometimes, in their private hours, his breath hot on her neck and her name spilling from his mouth in fervent whispers, he would hold her much too tight, like he was afraid she would just slip away in the darkness and never return.

She understood why. She knew that was how so many feral things got their start.

They were abandoned.


	27. Ransom

_Prompt No.27  
Word count: ~750  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: None  
Rating: K  
Themes: Torture, sacrifice_

**Ransom**

The dais shudders as he climbs the steps, reverberating as the blade hums in its pedestal. He knows that sword was meant for him. He knows it's his destiny. He knows that won't stop it from trying to kill him.

It gleams with a sacred luster that can repel evil. That's what the legends said. The truth is the light is just what the rest of the world sees when it opens its eyes to examine him—weigh him in its unfathomable balances and judge him worthy or not. He doesn't understand that until he's standing right in front of it, feet glued to the stone and heart bursting with terror in his chest. The sword's voice is breath and light, and he's fixed in its piercing gaze, and he knows if he fails to prove himself now it will strike him down before he can step off the dais.

He wraps his hands around the hilt and pulls. It accepts his challenge, sealing his hands to the grip, and he can feel it prying him open and searching every moment of his past, the very fabric of his future, all the pieces of him that define who he is and what he can be. Then he hears and sees and feels the voice again, all breath and light, vibrating through his soul so brightly that for a moment he's blind.

_Price. Ransom._

And he tries to understand it. He tries to fathom why the goddesses would imprison this blade in a pedestal, why they would demand a price to free it if it was their will that it be drawn at all. And then the sword glows and burns between his hands, and when he tries to jerk away from the pain he can't, and when the test begins his vision sears white and the voice is reverberating in him, _part _of him, and he has to listen as it lists the demands.

_Freedom._

And he feels it, shackling him to it forever. His destiny is bound up in that blade, threaded so inseparably that he knows he'll be its slave forever, and the loss of his will is so breath-taking and unreal that his legs nearly buckle.

_Self._

Because whoever he was, whoever he wanted to be, is irrelevant now. He's offering himself to the sword, and it's accepting him—he can feel it, binding itself to him, threading itself in his destiny—and it demands all of him. His identity is changing, morphing into something he barely recognizes. It's like he's being flayed alive, peeling away his old self so that he can be something else. He wants to scream. He wants to beg for it to stop. He doesn't want to lose himself. But the sword has chosen him now, and the only way out of their bargain is failure.

_Life._

And though he always knew offering himself meant as far as laying down his life, the sword means to make sure he grasps exactly how terrifying that will be; because any fool can _die_. But is he willing to let himself be ripped limb from limb, suffer in ways no man has suffered, for as long and for as many times as his destiny demands? And the sword pulls him there, dragging him down to the brink of death, to see how long he lasts. He can't breathe. His body is screaming and every nerve ending is burning. His blood is stilling in his veins and the horror of coming face to face with his own demise is swelling in him like tidewaters, reaching down his throat like it means to pull his heart out of his mouth.

And he realizes, then, that he could let go. The sword is giving him a chance—it has shown him the price that must be paid and the voice is asking him if he wants to walk away. But now he understands. The sword is not what's imprisoned. It's Hyrule itself. Her people. Her _princess_. And no person demands those things of him. It it simply what being the Hero means. And if he walks away now, there will be no one else to take his place, and the world will simply fade into darkness—so how could he?

He doesn't let go, and in the moment next the blade slips out of the stone.

And the sword closes its eyes and exhales in his hands, and leaves the rest up to him.


	28. Beaten

_Prompt No.28  
Word count: ~530  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
__Pairings: Zelink  
__Rating: T  
__Themes: Abduction, imprisonment, torture, beatings_

**Beaten**

He hears a voice, begging him to wake, and she's _screaming._

Hands close over his wrist as he comes to grip with consciousness, clap over his mouth, pull at his hair and his body, and soon he's being ripped out of a glowing altar, dripping and naked, and amidst a flurry of white masks painted in blood and blows to subdue him, all he can think is that he has no idea who he is.

He's gagged and beaten and carted through blinding sunlight and disorienting dark, through sweltering days and freezing nights. They lead him through a canyon, wrists bound and mouth tasting of old fabric and dust, and slip into the shadows of their hideout under cover of darkness so thick he can't see his hands in front of his face. They drag him into a cell and wrench his hands back and out, shackling him to hang from his wrists, and then he sees no one for three days.

It takes a while for the voice to find him. She isn't screaming anymore; her voice is gentle, like a drop of water in that abysmal place, trying to draw him towards hope. She tells him not to give up. She tells him to try to remember.

When they come back for him, they bottle-feed him a canteen of water that he drinks so desperately he whines when he feels some spill down his neck, and give him a little food, and then they beat him until he blacks out.

Sometimes they come for him with whips and chains. Sometimes when they bring him the canteen they tip it over and let him watch the water spill all over the floor. Sometimes they carve into him with sickles or hot irons, or close their hands over his nose and mouth until the world turns white. Sometimes, when the voice speaks to him, he talks back.

"Who are they?" he asks her once between bouts of darkness. "Why are they doing this?"

"The Yiga," she answers. Her voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, as thought she might be heard. He knows she won't. He's heard her screaming when they torture him. "They abuse you because of who you are."

"_I_ don't even know who I am."

"I've told you."

"Knowing my name and my destiny doesn't mean I know myself," he murmurs, bitterly, blood slipping between his teeth, and she goes silent. "I wish I could remember you."

"It's there," she assures him gently. "In your mind."

He spits weakly, trying to clear his lips of the taste of grime and rust, and stares for a while into the void in his memory where her face should be.

"They say you can't hold him forever," he whispers, throat hoarse from screaming. "They say it's only a matter of time until he breaks free."

"They're probably right."

"They say I was your last hope."

For reasons he can't fathom, there's a smile on her voice.

"Yes."

He stares incredulously into the dark. "Then why do you hold on?"

"Why do you?"

"I… I want to see your face."

Her voice is smiling again.

"I want to see yours."


	29. Numb

_Prompt No. 29  
Word count: ~1200  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
Pairings: None, sorta  
Rating: T  
Themes: Abduction, torture, venom, paralysis_

**Numb**

They came for him in the middle of the night. He remembered his mother screaming. He remembered his father shouting, the sound of the scuffle in the darkness as he tried to stop them, and the deafening silence that followed when his body hit the ground. He remembered the fear in his mother's eyes, green and alight in the glare of torchfire shining through the window, watching him desperately above the hand clapped over her mouth.

He remembered getting dragged away that night and not understanding why.

That was years ago, now, the images of his abduction still burned in his mind and flashing occasionally behind his eyes without context. He hadn't seen much else since. Just darkness, and white masks, and the unchanging walls of his cell.

"_…just kill him?_" he heard, once, just before the door opened.

"_He'll be reborn,_" came the answer in a low growl. "_Can't have that._"

And then they had paced in and strung him from the ceiling and whipped his naked body raw.

The torture had always been regular and agonizing, but he quickly learned that there were some things that would push them to punish him out of rage more than habit. He was conditioned never to speak, never to look them in the eye. But the worst was that awful burning sensation on his left hand, the one he couldn't control and that turned their eyes wild with fury. It had been happening more and more, the glow of it bright enough to illuminate the darkest corners of his cell and the pain a brutal punishment in and of itself.

They had tried everything short of cutting his hand off to make it stop. They spent three days trying to burn the mark off with a branding iron. But it always healed within seconds. He wished it would just extinguish, leave him and torment someone else. Maybe then they would let him go, and he could find that tiny house in that dark village, where his mother had screamed his name until her voice had cut terribly short.

Ripples of light poured out of his hand like water, snaking under the door and into the hallway as it flared again, and he whimpered. He bit his lip, fingers biting into his wrist in a useless reflex to keep the fire from spreading up his arm. But it only burned brighter, smoldering hotter the more he tried to resist. The pain seared a deliberate path into his chest and burst in gold and white lights behind his eyes.

By the time the door swung open and they took him by the arms, holding him still and wrenching his head back by the hair, he was half-blind. He pinched his eyes shut as a third stepped toward him to administer a vial, tears streaming down his face as he tried and tried _and tried_ to make the light stop glowing. They forced his mouth open and emptied the viscous liquid all over his tongue, and then clapped their hand over his mouth until he swallowed, panting and trembling all over in anticipation of what was to come. He knew from experience that it wouldn't kill him. And that was the thing that scared him the most.

Lizalfos venom had been reserved for only his greatest indiscretions in the past. Now it seemed he was earning a dose more than once a week.

They dropped him when his legs gave out, leaving him to convulse on the floor as the light began to fade. His body tingled with pins and needles as the paralysis took hold, turning his limbs and his flesh numb, his lips and his fingertips, the muscles and nerves along his spine. And then the venom burned in earnest, eating him alive from the inside out, setting fire to bones and organs and the underside of all the numb places, sending him jerking and writhing everywhere he had an ounce of feeling and holding all his screams taut in his deadened throat.

It finally overtook the burning on his hand, and the room went dark, and the venom didn't leave his system for two days.

The next time they came for him, their rage was overshadowed by their panic. Chaos sounded from down the corridor, but their frenetic intent had him too concerned with his own wellbeing to care what that might mean.

"Give him the vials," one of them ordered the rest, breathless, as the door snapped shut behind them, "all of them!"

They locked his arms and wrenched his head back again as a third fumbled with the stoppers in the dark, and he loose a single, alarmed cry in protest. They only pulled harder at his scalp.

"Don't be a fool," another voice hissed. "That many doses will kill him."

"And if she senses he's here? If they find him?" he growled. "If he dies, we'll start again."

The venom flooded his mouth, and when he hesitated to swallow they beat him in the stomach. Before he could so much as draw a breath they were forcing a second vial down his throat.

By the time the door was knocked off its hinges, he had swallowed six times.

One of his captors drew a blade to finish him as more shadows flew into the room, dark as night, blue as twilight, silent as breath, but the invaders ended them before they could follow through. He collapsed without their arms holding him taut, and more silhouettes stepped inside the door. A glow burst through the room, but it wasn't coming from his hand. It was coming from hers.

The girl at the threshold rushed through the carnage to him and fell to her knees, holding his face in her hands as his body twitched uselessly on the floor. Her face was illuminated gently by the glow on her hand. He couldn't help thinking she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"He's the one," she called, voice trembling, eyes watering, searching him frantically as the venom burned him alive and his eyes rolled back in his head. He wished he could feel her touch. He imagined it was soft. "Impa, help me! He can't breathe!"

Another shadow loomed beside her, her eyes red as blood, barely touching the sphere of her light. His hand was dark, too numb to respond, though he felt somewhere in himself that he would if he could have. She picked up an empty vial off the floor and tasted the rim, and then grimaced.

"I can't help him. I don't have anything that works quickly enough. Only your powers can save him now."

"But I can't—I don't know _how_—" She was weeping now, brushing his bangs from his forehead as she looked for his eyes and drawing him closer. Her eyes were green, like his mother's, and full of the same fear. She whispered, broken, to him or to the gods, "_Please_."

Then she touched her forehead to his, and in a sudden wash of feeling the numbness and the venom drained from his body, and the light on the back of his hand pulsed a brilliant beacon in tandem with hers.


	30. Recovery

_Prompt No.30  
Word count: ~1760  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No.29 — Numb"  
Pairings: None, sorta, or, you know, Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Trauma, separation anxiety, elective mutism_

**Recovery**

The boy was a far cry from the hero he was meant to be. He wouldn't speak. It was evident from the way he picked as his food that he wasn't used to eating such large portions, or more than once a day. They struggled to get him into a bath, and when they brought him to his room that night he only stared at his bed until Zelda coaxed him to lie down, like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it. He wouldn't let go of her hand, even in his sleep, so she dragged an armchair beside his bed and spent the night drooped over the edge of his mattress.

In the morning he was standing at the window, listening to songbirds and watching the city below ease awake with the rising sun. He looked neither longing nor hopeful; simply awestruck that so much world existed outside the Hideout. She stretched sore shoulders and curled up in her armchair, huddling down in her blanket. The fire still needed tending.

"Do you want to go there?" she tried softly, hopefully, but he didn't turn, studying the way his breath fogged the glass and disappeared. "Are you hungry yet?"

He touched it, drawing back gently to thumb at the moisture stuck to his finger.

"Maybe you just don't know you're hungry," she decided, and slipped out of the blanket long enough to ring the bell. When a footman stepped through the door not a minute later, he lurched back five feet, eyes wide as saucers, and the princess swallowed a sigh. "Breakfast, please, and send someone to get the fire going."

He didn't relax until the footman was long gone, and then sprang alert again when the maid came in to lay logs on the grate, and when they returned with breakfast trays. She patted the edge of the bed, trying to tempt him out of his fixation on the closed door, and nibbled on a piece of bacon pinched between her fingers. Introducing a fork yesterday had proved a futile exercise, and she was slowly learning to choose her battles.

"I still don't know what to call you," she mused, a small smile turning her lips as he imitated her, eyes widening as he brought a corner of bacon to his mouth and then closing with unfiltered ecstasy as he devoured it. "Careful. That's rich."

He wasn't listening. But there were only two strips on his plate, and when they were gone she didn't have the heart to keep from offering him another piece from her own.

She murmured, handing him a roll to counteract the grease, "Do you have a name?"

He plucked the roll with his right hand and then pressed his fingertips to hers with his left, watching the light percolate out of the lines etched over his wrist; he took a thoughtful bite of bread and nodded.

"Won't you tell me what it is?"

But she had lost him, fixated on the light pulsing between them and the soft, warm bread in his spare hand, and she sighed, gently brushing his bangs out of his face.

"You must have questions," she whispered. "I wish you would ask me."

After the bacon and the roll had gone he abandoned the idea of eating, leaving fruits and eggs and all sorts of things she had to remind herself he would have opportunity to try again another time, and linking his fingers in hers he tugged her towards the bay window.

"That's Castle Town," she told him, sitting on the bench cushion. "It's mostly homes and little shops, but there's also tactile industry here and plenty of ironworking, and there's the cathedral…"

A curious glance from him told her he had no idea what she was talking about, and she gave him an apologetic smile.

"I can take you. But there are a lot of people in town. You don't seem to care for strangers." He pressed fingers to the glass, eyes scanning the rooftops, and she sighed. "How can I convince you you're safe here?"

They spent the morning at that window, and the afternoon venturing down castle corridors and exploring libraries and parlors and the notion of knocking before entering. They attempted a small, private dinner with her father and Impa, but he fisted his hands in his lap and wouldn't touch his food, and after two courses Zelda decided to put him out of his misery and take him back to his room.

The next day was a little better. She got to sleep in her own bed—there were _some _things she insisted they do separately, communicated through a lot of awkward gestures, and once he understood that they would reunite soon afterwards his separation anxiety eased somewhat—and when the staff came to bring their breakfast and stir the fire the next morning he didn't jump out of his skin. Impa tagged along while they explored the courtyards later, which he didn't seem to mind, and when she asked him again if he would tell her his name, there was a glimmer in his eye when he shook his head.

The morning after that she had the brilliant idea to introduce him to the best thing in the world.

"Are you going to tell me your name today?" she greeted him as she snapped the door shut behind her with her heel, her hands full with two plates. He gave her a look she could only describe as wry as he moved from the window to meet her at the mattress, and she slid one of the plates across the comforter. "This is fruitcake."

He studied it dubiously, his nose scrunching when he decided it definitely wasn't bacon.

"Don't make a face until you've tried it," she scolded him, reaching for her slice. It was sticky on her fingers; she regretted not choosing this morning to reintroduce forks.

She took a bite and let herself indulge in the heavenliness of it, and he quickly followed, encouraged by her reaction. She smiled when he took a more enthusiastic second taste, smearing cream and fruit everywhere.

"You have frosting," she laughed between bites, gesturing at the corner of her mouth and demonstrating, "just there. Lick it off."

He tried it, eyes dancing a bit when he discovered the lingering sweetness, and she shook her head at him and turned her attention back to her food.

And then he leaned forward without warning and gently cleaned cream and sugar from the corner of her lips with the warm tip of his tongue, and then he went back to his cake, oblivious to her shock.

"You," she finally breathed, her slice hovering awkwardly in the air as she dithered, "need to work on your manners before we go into town."

She stuffed the rest of her cake in her mouth, trying to disguise the flush in her cheeks, while he tasted the remnants of his devoured dessert on his fingertips.

Then his face turned reticent, eyes flickering uncertainly towards the door, and he pressed his nose right up against her ear and whispered, "Link."

That night they gave him another much less eventful bath, and a fresh change of clothes, and the next day, despite her earlier threats about his lack of etiquette, she asked if he wanted to go in to town. There were some rules he wasn't very happy about—it wasn't appropriate for the princess to be seen waltzing about town holding a young man's hand, _especially _if those hands were prone to glowing when joined, and they would be escorted by a few guards—but after considering the terms he nodded.

Town through his eyes was a wonder. Every flower shop, every belled goat and bakery and feathered millinery, were new and strange and worth stopping to examine in exhaustive detail. He turned a few heads himself; he was a scrawny thing, still quite malnourished, and despite his fine clothes it must have seemed odd that he was keeping company with the princess—nevermind that he was much too fascinated with the simplest things. Still, the guards were enough of a deterrent that the crowds kept a respectful distance, and Link was thoroughly distracted with everything to mind the attention much.

Then he stopped at a boutique, his expression falling, and Zelda followed his line of sight to a rainbow sparrow in a wooden birdcage.

She touched his shoulder gently when she sensed him fixating, and he shuddered and whispered, "Why?"

Her attempts to explain that their beautiful song and plumage lent them value did nothing to allay his displeasure, and in the end, when she couldn't get him to leave the stall, she bought it for him. He opened the door and watched the sparrow fly out of sight, and then left the cage on the roadside and wandered back towards the castle gate.

His brow was furrowed in thought as he walked, and she drifted closer, anticipating, _hoping_, that he might try to put those thoughts into words.

Finally, he curled his fingers into his chest, pointing there a few times, before he asked again, "Why?"

She sighed. This wasn't exactly the place she wanted to have this conversation. But he was initiating, and she could hardly turn him down.

"You have a destiny," she answered quietly. "You're meant to overthrow them and their Master. They feared what you would become, and so…"

She met his eyes, wondering if anything she was saying could possibly mean something to him, but they were rapt.

"The mark on your hand means you're chosen by the gods. We still don't know how they found you so young, but…" She held her arms, suddenly cold. "I'm so sorry. We should have protected you."

He went silent again, thinking for a long time, and she wondered if that was the end of it. Then he said, "You have a destiny, too."

She smiled at him sadly. "Yes. I've been searching for you for as long as I can remember. We're meant to do this together."

He didn't return her smile, his lips tugging down and his eyes wandering the cobblestones as he digested that revelation.

Then he spotted a young man surprising his sweetheart with a modest bouquet, and his face morphed curious again, tilting his head as he watched him indulge in his lady's kisses.

He decided in her ear, baffled, "There's no frosting on her mouth."

Zelda stifled a laugh.

Overall, she counted the experience as two steps forward, one step back.


	31. Embrace

_Prompt No.31  
Word count: ~1620  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No.30 — Recovery"  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: T  
Themes: Trauma, suppressed anger, blood, venom_

**Embrace**

A week later, despite Zelda's reservations, they brought Link to the pedestal in the forest. The sword slipped from the stone as easily as venom slipped from the vial. He could barely hold it aloft, but the moment he touched it he knew it was meant to be his.

He learned quickly. They trained him with wooden wasters, but the Master Sword felt better despite its extra weight and length, as though it were a part of him. Sometimes, sparring in that arena, he forgot to look for her. As his skill increased, so would the difficulty, and soon lapses were resulting in a stab or a strike instead of a verbal correction. It brought out latent anger he didn't know had been festering in him and didn't know how to begin to address.

Some days he felt drunk on the sensation of fighting back.

There were other sensations, just as heady, far more sweet, that he was becoming acquainted with as well: the dazzling spangles and glitter of green eyes; the warmth of the light pulsing between them when their fingers slipped effortlessly together; and, just now, the delicate taste of her bare lips, giving beneath his without the cloying sweetness of frosting.

He froze, brow furrowed, when she told him to stop, when he realized that in his haste and his want he had trapped her between him and the wall. Her eyes were watery. He took a quick, deliberate step back. A retreat, the captain would have called it.

His voice was little more than a rough whisper, pulling out of some dark, untapped place flooded with her light. "Sorry."

Her chest rose and fell in alluring synchrony with his, tempting him closer again, but he kept his feet planted, watching her wipe at downcast eyes with her wrist.

"It's just—" she started, but then a noise lodged in her throat, and it was several seconds before she breathed again. "It's not right."

He dithered, wondering if it would be wrong to ask why. To him, it had seemed very, very right.

"Which part?"

"All of it," she bubbled, a little hysteric. "You're healing and vulnerable and—_broken_."

He thought on that for a moment, still not sure he understood the problem. He whispered, "I don't feel broken when I'm with you."

And apparently he had made things much worse, because she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

"This isn't good for either of us," she warbled through her tears, imploring him, red-eyed, "don't you see?"

"No," he told her, because he didn't.

"It's complicated."

"You say that about a lot of things."

"Because they _are_, Link. I just…" She sighed, reaching for reason and coming back with fistfuls of air. Her reason had fled the moment he kissed her. "My lips don't even have frosting on them."

He drifted closer, remembering, and dared to taste the corner of her mouth again.

"I like the way you taste better without it."

She crumbled like a sandcastle in the surf. In short order he had her back up against the wall, her fingers threaded in his hair, and when he pulled at the hem of her tunic without understanding why, just knowing he didn't want this, want _anything_, between them, she planted a hand on his chest and told him firmly that _that _was definitely out of the question. Then she pulled him back in by the collar and coaxed his mouth open again.

Weeks flew by in a blur of swordplay and sparring by day, and breathless, stolen kisses at night, where he seemed to spend all his time trying to figure out a way to make shifting her tunic out from between them less offensive somehow, and making very little progress—though he had dropped to his knees once and dragged the material up with his nose, laying hot, open-mouthed kisses along her belly and hip, and the sound she had made before she could object had set his spine on fire.

Then word came from the desert that the Yiga were on the move, and strange, rainless storms raged across Hyrule like a plague.

The sword hummed in his hands, glowing with a sacred luster as it whispered warnings into the otherworldly places where they were connected, and they left the relatively safe confines of the castle to meet the enemy at the chokepoint where the desert canyons met the dunes.

He touched her hand, as they camped in the shadow of the Highlands, setting off a reassuring glow, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. He knew, despite the weight and muscle he had put on and the grueling training regimen, that she was still worried he wasn't ready. He knew that she was wrong. And he knew that she was right.

He tore through the desert like a force of nature. The sword was less of a weapon in his hands and more of a storm, hewing footsoldiers in two with a sound like thunder and shattering Windcleavers and bones in the strength of his blows. And then, as they drove the Yiga back into the Karusa Valley, a monstrosity of flame and malice burst out of the rock, renting the cliffs asunder and sending the earth quaking beneath their feet. It lacked true form, spewing sinewy limbs across the sand as it slithered between canyon walls and dunes, and the ancient hate fueling it awakened a dormant power in Zelda.

Between the wrathful blaze of Link's blade and the blinding pulse of her power, the desert was brighter in that swathe of twilight than it ever had been in the glare of day. The Calamity absorbed the carnage left in the Hero's wake, turning broken swords and armor and bone into joints and burning spines, growing and swelling until it seemed it might swallow the world whole. But as it made to devour him, Link drove the blade deep into its gaping maw, and in one fell swoop it was engulfed in Zelda's light.

And the battle was over.

The silence after so much chaos made his ears ring. He turned and met her eyes, still aglow with power, from across the sprawl of desert. They were asking him a question he didn't want to answer. Burned, bleeding, run through in so many places, Link turned his back on his army and the battlefield, and marched, dragging his blade through the sand, towards the Hideout.

It was vacant. Whatever Yiga he hadn't felled on the battlefield were swallowed by the monster as it grappled its way toward power. He found the corridor where he had spent most of his life, found the dark cell sitting innocuously in the stone. He found the offshoots where they kept their implements of torture, their blades and their scourges, their branding irons and ropes and devices he had no name for, and vials and vials and vials, spread across an abandoned workspace where the Yiga went through the painstaking process of extracting and purifying it.

He scoured the Hideout for something more. There were no other cells. No other prisoners. No greater purpose other than to break him, keep him hanging on to life by a thread while dousing his desire to live. And then, standing again amidst the sickles and the venom, the rage and misery came pouring out of him all at once.

He flung his sword into a rack of weapons with a cry, sweeping the table with his arms and tearing fabric and flesh across the vials. The glass shattered and the venom turned his bloody hands numb, and after that he didn't feel anything. He splintered tables and his own knuckles, he shredded leather from barbs and his skin from his palms. He knocked hooks and claws from the walls, and didn't notice the way the mark mended itself shut again and again.

When there was nothing left to destroy, either in the room or on his arms, he turned, panting, and met the watery eyes of his princess.

He wanted to tell her how angry he was, put words to the fury and the shame that was turning his vision red, but he couldn't make the sounds form, his throat bobbing uselessly as he tried to force a shout, and he backed to the wall and slid to his haunches, coming face to face with the blood all over himself as he went to dip his head into his mangled hands. Zelda lumbered to him, weak from exertion and sorrow, and collapsed.

"It's over," she told him, sobbing, taking his face, spattered with blood and malice and grime, in trembling hands. "You can be free. You can pursue your own happiness, chase it to the farthest reaches and never look back. No one can keep you from that now. Not the king, or the captain, or—or me."

His expression flickered, brow furrowing deep and eyes boring inflexibly into hers. He wanted to touch her face, draw her in so she couldn't look away, but his hands were ripped apart and oozing. He leaned into her slowly instead, kissing her eyes closed and drawing his lips over her cheekbone, tasting her, breathing her, like a calming incense after the storm of combat.

"_You _are my happiness," he murmured against her skin, eyes falling shut as he trailed down towards her mouth. "And if enduring this destiny was the price for having you, then so be it."

He savored her tear-stained lips for as long as she would let him, and then she buried herself in his neck and wrapped him tight in her arms, and they stayed in that embrace, exhausted and aching and wanting for nothing else, for a long time.


	32. Regrets

_A/N: Surprise! An anon requested a conclusion to the Muffled Scream/Humiliation story arc, so here we are. Enjoy no. 32!_

_W__ord count: ~1980  
Universe: Majora's Mask, sequel to "No.25 — Humiliation"  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: K  
Themes: Catharsis_

_—_

"Yours," she whispered, mirroring his touch, tracing porcelain lips as her mind plunged towards dangerous places. As she threw caution to the wind. Because she couldn't have come all this way only to lose him to this now. "I'll wear this one."

He tilted his head gently, eyes receding in thought.

"An intriguing idea," he admitted. "It's been so long since…"

Her heart pounded in her throat as he toyed with the thought, as he let himself consider it. He came back to himself, smirked at her.

"You're very clever, Princess."

She swallowed, trembling as he drifted closer. His hands found her neck and his eyes locked with hers, so full of intent she couldn't look away. And then his mouth pulled into a fleeting, hungry smile, and he dove for her, pressing unyielding lips to hers, sealing against them in a kiss that wasn't a kiss at all.

She gasped as the cold, smooth alabaster of his lips folded against hers, _over _hers, until his were the ones giving. The sensation of it coated her teeth, the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat. It grew from where they touched, sucking against the skin on her jaw and up the planes of her face to her cheekbones, sloughing off him in pieces that cracked and snapped into place, leaving him behind so it could devour her. It melted against the bridge of her nose, against her eye sockets, until she was seeing through a white film, until she could feel him gasping against her mouth and clawing at the ridge of her jaw where the edge of a mask should have been.

"No, no, no," he begged, panic-stricken, digging at the bone beneath her ear for a hold that didn't exist. He dropped his forehead against hers as her eyes closed, as the mask sank in and took hold. "Please, no. Just let her go. Please."

"Don't like sharing?"

He met her eyes: stark white, set in ivory skin that was nearly as fair as her real face. It made his stomach drop, and then rise back up into his throat. She gently bit at her lip, masking a smile.

"If you want it back, you're going to have to kiss me again."

He rolled back and out of her arms, getting to his feet, turning on her to stare at the flames in the hearth, to grasp for answers where her empty eyes weren't. She followed, wrapping his arm in her hands and pressing her face into his shoulder, shaking with silent laughter.

"It was just a joke," she whispered, and hearing that _thing's _words in her voice made his blood boil in a way it hadn't in years.

"It wasn't funny."

She pouted. "Don't be cross. Isn't this better? Isn't this what you've always wanted?"

He scowled at her, at the unfair insights she now possessed, and she turned him around, melting closer and sliding hands up his shoulders.

"I understand magic, and its consequences. I could stay. Haven't you always wanted someone to share this burden with you?" And then, as her hands found his neck, as she drifted ever closer and her eyes flickered to his mouth, "Haven't you always wanted _me_?"

"_Stop it_, Zelda," he growled, taking her by the wrists and forcing her back two steps. "This isn't you."

She glared, her pretty features turning down into a perfect, cream-colored scowl as he rejected her.

"What do you know of who I am? You disappear for years, abandon Hyrule, abandon _me_, and for what?" She tore across the room, shouldering past him, and yanked the chest out hurled it to its side, sending the masks within spilling all over the floor. "For these? For a power that you were too weak to master?"

The Deku mask stared up at him, its hollow snout and orange eyes angled in perpetual sorrow. The first one. The mask that cursed him to undertake that journey so long ago. His eyes darted to the Mask of Scents, to the Stone Mask, to the Gibdo Mask, tracing the twisting path his past had taken and all the regrets he had gotten tangled up in along the way. Then he stared at her, wearing the last one. The mask that had ultimately sealed his fate.

"Not that it matters," she scoffed. "Even if you had come back, you never could have controlled this. You never would have found the strength to destroy them. And I never could have loved you."

"Then leave the mask and go," he snapped, not quite able to hide the way her words made him flinch. "It's my burden to bear."

"Strangely enough," she murmured, smiling a little, running her hands up her scalp and through her hair as she luxuriated in it, "I rather like wearing it. And I think the mask likes me better, too. Maybe I'll keep it. Wouldn't that be more fitting? For the mask to stay with me, a queen, instead of with you? A broken, forgotten goatherd?"

"I won't let you do this. I won't let you drag her into it."

She rolled her eyes. "There's nothing you can do. If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it."

He lurched forward, livid, wishing he could pull the veil off her face and crush it in his bare hands, and she met him, eyes sparkling as she flash him two rows of perfect teeth.

"Poor hero. Have I struck a nerve?"

"Just tell me what you want," he growled, so very tired of this constant game, of this curse he brought upon himself, and dreading whatever bargain it would demand.

"Powerless again," she droned, brushing the back of a lithe finger around his ear, down his jaw, and he only had the patience to tolerate it a fraction of a second before he closed his hand around her wrist, stilling her. She smirked. "And yet, it never gets old."

"I'm waiting."

She tucked her smile away, but it still danced in the pale circles of her eyes. "You know why I came. I wanted to know why you never came home."

He steeled himself with a breath, grasping after courage. It seemed so far away. He turned away from her again, setting another log on the grate. He didn't suppose this would be over quickly.

"Everything is a game to you," he whispered, and she scoffed again.

"Life is a game, Link."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Use that voice. Say that name."

She folded her arms with a huff. "Well I can hardly help it."

"Stop pretending to be her!" he whirled, furious, and she met him, eyes wild and ferocious.

"I _am _her!"

"What do you want from me?" he seethed, taking her shoulders in his hands too roughly. But the smile in her eyes never left. "I told you why I couldn't come back!"

"Then maybe I'm asking the wrong question," she mused, a little breathless. "Maybe I should be asking why you left in the first place."

His fingers bit into her arms. But he was the one who was paralyzed.

"You know why."

"Because you were chasing after a fairy?" she intoned, arching a slender brow. "We both know that isn't true."

He swallowed and it burned. Burned like the ashen light in her eyes.

"Go on," she cooed, reaching through his iron grip to cup his face with one hand, and he was weak enough to lean into it. "Admit that you lied. Confess your secrets. Tell me what a coward you were."

He was cornered. Surrounded by his secrets, by his regrets, littered in hollow faces all over the floor. And his two greatest regrets were now merged into one, demanding his surrender. Demanding an answer. Demanding the truth he had kept locked in his soul so long he had to cut himself open to let it lose.

"I left because I was alone," he whispered, dropping his face so he wouldn't have to meet the vacant eyes she had taken for him. "I had no friends, no past, no destiny. I was used up, and useless, and trapped in a body that wasn't mine anymore."

Heat sizzled around him, flickering up out of nothing and then dying out again. He smelled burning hair and singed leaves and burned out wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw seafoam flames, and followed it in time to watch a Deku child burn away into oblivion, and a spill of ivy-spangled pink hair, and the angry snout of a pig.

Zelda tried to pull out of his arms, but he held fast, daring to meet her eyes again. Drinking courage from the fear in them to undo what he had held onto for so long.

"I left because I had no where to go. Because I didn't belong. Because I couldn't bear the thought of starting over, of planting the tiny, fragile seeds of friendship in old soil and watching people I didn't recognize sprout up out of them."

More licks of flame ate at his masks. The crown of a frog, a eyes of a bird, the ears of a rabbit, the sharp angles of a fox. A Zora, a Goron, a cow. A face of stone.

"Stop," she hissed, struggling, but he latched onto her, pulled her close, made her watch as hot, thick tears streamed down his face. "Stop it!"

"I left because I was angry. Because I was afraid of a future I couldn't know. Because when you stripped away my title and my fate and my heroics, I was no one."

More of them melted, faces of men and bones and symbols of love and responsibility and torture and death, and powers not meant for the world. They burned around him with his regrets, until only the greatest of all, the one he held in his arms, was left.

"I left because _I loved you_," he choked out, staring through blurred eyes as the flames burst to life over half her face, eating the mask off of one eye. "I loved you, and I never told you. I just let you send me back to a time where you didn't even _know _me. And once it was over I realized my mistake, and I wanted to tell you, I wanted so badly to tell you. But we were _children_—"

She gasped, half herself, half a monster, the mask still covering a swathe of her face and her mouth, but melting, burning, bleeding away in great dripping pieces that fizzled to nothing before they touched the floor. Her legs gave out and he caught her, cradling her as she trembled with short, desperate breaths.

"I hope now you know," she gasped, her body rolling with the mask's death throes, "Regrets are the fiercest god of all."

He reached up to the burning alabaster edge, decaying at the bridge of her nose, and ripped the mask off her face and sent it skittering across the floor. She collapsed in his arms as she fell back into herself, sobbing, and the face of the white warrior writhed in a scatter of flame and disappeared.

"I'm sorry," he breathed, clutching her to him as she burrowed into his throat. "It's gone. It's over. I'm so sorry."

But she clawed at his arms, at his neck, pulling at him like she couldn't be close enough. It made him warm, warmer than he could remember being in ages. It made him cry harder.

"Please come home, Link," she wept into his neck. "Please."

"Home," he whispered, testing the bounds of the word, the foreign taste of it.

And he realized, like a bolt of lightning rippling down his spine and tearing him asunder, that he felt more at home there in her arms than he had in any lifetime before.


End file.
